Glenn Harlan Reynolds has a USA Today column enumerating the various ways that American higher education is becoming a joke. The hypersensitivity — a kind of intolerance in its own right — is getting to be too much even for some academics, which is an encouraging development. Professor Reynolds teaches law at the University of Tennessee.
Other academics who have recently said enough is enough include the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, James Ryan, who firmly rebuffed a protest over a commencement speaker; William Bowen, the former president of Princeton, who chastised Haverford students for protesting an invitation to the former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley; and Stephen L. Carter, a professor at Yale, who wrote a Bloomberg column mocking the spate of disinvitations to commencement speakers.