This reads like it could have been written yesterday but is in fact from James Q. Wilson (from the same Harvard Government Department that has been home to Claudine Gay, Henry Kissinger, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan), writing in the June 1972 issue of Commentary, "Liberalism Versus Liberal Education":
How, then, can I suggest that a liberal education is at all inconsistent with liberalism? I suggest it, quite simply, by pointing to the fact that it is within higher education that one finds today many but not all of the most serious threats to certain liberal values—the harassment of unpopular views, the use of force to prevent certain persons from speaking, the adoption of quota systems either to reduce the admissions of certain kinds of students or enhance the admissions of other kinds, and the politicization of the university to make it an arena for the exchange of manifestoes rather than a forum for the discussion of ideas.
The liberal values that have become precarious in the very institution that once defended them are those of civility, free speech, equality of opportunity, and the maintenance of a realm of privacy and intimacy safe from the constant assaults of the political and the societal. These are not, as I shall point out, the only elements of the liberal faith, but they are important ones and they are very much in jeopardy. I realize that the vast majority of faculty and students do not approve of acts which jeopardize these values; from time to time they even say, quietly, that they deplore them; yet the vast majority also have created a communal setting and institutional culture that permits such acts to continue. The imperiled values have not been repudiated so much as they have been subjected to benign neglect.
...The New Left may have repudiated itself by its extremism but it also weakened the institution that gave birth to it by casting doubt on the legitimacy of the university and of the principles of free discussion that support it....
During my adult life I have been part of five institutions—the Catholic Church, the University of Redlands, the United States Navy, the University of Chicago, and Harvard University. If I were required to rank them by the extent to which free and uninhibited discussion was possible within them, I am very much afraid that the Harvard of 1972 would not rank near the top.