Campus free speech is a thing of the past

Not that long ago, the sorts of views that were verboten on a university campus were genuinely out-there and nasty: fascism, racism, radical Islam, that sort of thing. It was generally accepted that university was the place to air and interrogate even the most eccentric ideas. Many people still had their limits, but those limits were sufficiently broad that they weren’t tested all that often. And when they were, real scumbags, with genuinely obnoxious opinions, were usually involved.

The big campus controversy of 2002 was whether British National Party leader Nick Griffin and Islamic fundamentalist Abu Hamza should be allowed to appear in a debate at the Cambridge Union. That’s almost unimaginable today. The bar for what is acceptable has fallen so low of late that the big campus story of recent weeks was a decision by officials at Sheffield university to ban students from wearing sombreros this Halloween on the grounds that white people wearing them might be offensive to Mexicans.