Emma Brown, who writes about education, recently told Post readers about Julie Lythcott-Haims’s new book, “How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success.” Lythcott-Haims, a former Stanford dean, suggests parents pay attention to their language: “If you say ‘we’ when you mean your son or your daughter — as in, ‘We’re on the travel soccer team’ — it’s a hint to yourself that you are intertwined in a way that is unhealthy.”

But whatever responsibility attaches to the parenting that produced those brittle Yalies, a larger portion of blame goes to the monolithic culture of academia. Where progressivism reigns, vigilant thought police will enforce a peace of wary conformity. Here is why:

If you believe, as progressives do, that human nature is not fixed, and hence is not a basis for understanding natural rights. And if you believe, as progressives do, that human beings are soft wax who receive their shape from the society that government shapes. And if you believe, as progressives do, that people receive their rights from the shaping government. And if you believe, as progressives do, that people are the sum of the social promptings they experience. Then it will seem sensible for government, including a university’s administration, to guarantee not freedom of speech but freedom from speech. From, that is, speech that might prompt its hearers to develop ideas inimical to progress, and that might violate the universal entitlement to perpetual serenity.