In recent years, diversity, equity, and inclusion administrators have proliferated across colleges as the “kindly inquisitors” of the “Great Awokening.” These officials are supposed to make sure that people from underrepresented groups feel included on campus. Yet in practice, DEI offices and the deans who supervise them have taken on a dubious enterprise: enforcing leftist speech norms most familiar to highly educated cultural elites. The unspoken assumption is that disciplining a scholar for, say, an offensive tweet will help young people from marginalized backgrounds. It’s an assumption that too many universities simply accept and too few feel any need to study or measure, let alone prove.

In practice, nonprogressives of all races have ample reason to fear that, unless their speech is perfectly artful, they won’t just face criticism; they’ll have HR problems. Student activists respond to that incentive. They reframe ideological disagreements as emotional traumas or “unsafe” climates. Deans either don’t know or don’t care that ostensibly neutral rules are being weaponized in ideological power struggles.

The absurd result in this matter: For months, Shapiro was in the public eye without incident—national newspapers, TV programs, think tanks, podcasts, and other outlets uncontroversially interviewed him and circulated his ideas—even as a major university banned him from setting foot on its campus. Universities are supposed to be earth’s most freethinking settings, yet they employ administrators who condescendingly behave as if even law students cannot thrive unless protected from the sorts of speech that pervade American society.