The scope of what now gets quashed is also far more extensive. In the sixties, all that was persecuted was some occasional countercultural flamboyance. But at present, virtually any serious discussion of social and political matters risks being silenced, because to be serious it would have to include left-of-center and right-of center-opinion, and the campuses don’t want that. So, we’ve gone from the campus as the only place where discussion must have no limits, to the campus as the only place where free discussion isn’t possible.

Even that isn’t the worst of it. The way that issues are pursued has also changed radically. On contentious subjects such as the actual effects of welfare, or of racial preferences, the old academic way of proceeding was empirical investigation. It looked at real world results to determine whether welfare increased or reduced poverty, and whether preferences helped or hurt minority students. Now contrast that methodology with one that doesn’t investigate but instead takes for granted that both preferences and welfare are natural and desirable, and consequently assumes that the only people who could oppose them are the greedy and racist rich who don’t want to give up their money or their privilege. Call this the “smears instead of investigation” approach.

Fifty to 60 years ago, academia was naturally the home of the investigative approach to social questions, and my academic colleagues at that time, on the left and right, all felt that the non-investigative approach was beneath them. That was what politicians did. A left-wing friend investigating increases in the minimum wage turned against the idea when the data told him that it hurt the people it was supposed to help. But today, the “smears instead of investigation” approach is common throughout academia, of all places, while the investigative approach can get you into real trouble if you venture into areas (say, colonialism) where a radical-left orthodoxy prevails.

Now, if we juxtapose typical professors of these two eras in light of all these differences, it’s obvious that they have nothing in common. This almost reminds me of those horror movies in which some sinister force manages to abduct some people and replace them with clones who look identical but are really an alien species. The difference is that one kind of replacement happens overnight while the other took 50 years to complete.