GEORGE WILL: AMERICAN COLLEGES ARE REAPING THE PROGRESSIVE WHIRLWIND:

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 might violate the universal entitlement to perpetual serenity.

On campuses so saturated with progressivism that they celebrate diversity in everything but thought, every day is a snow day: There are perishable snowflakes everywhere. The institutions have brought this on themselves. So, regarding the campuses’ current agonies, schadenfreude is not a guilty pleasure, it is obligatory.

Or as Jonah Goldberg put it, in somewhat earthier terms, via a callback to the Al Pacino in Scarface, “You Stupid Schmucks, Look at You Now.”

Related: In “Liberals v. Maoists,” Matthew Hennessey of City Journal writes that “The turmoil on campus is the Left’s problem to solve:”

We hear a lot about the Republicans’ Tea Party problem but almost nothing about the Democrats’ Maoist problem. What’s Bernie Sanders’s take on the goings-on at Missouri? What’s Hillary Clinton’s?

“We’ll soon learn whether the old-fashioned liberals have what it takes to stand up to the Maoists,” Hennessey concludes. “So far, it’s not looking good.” The previous iteration of this story, when the young Turks of the New Left attacked the staid New Deal-era Democrats in the 1960s didn’t end very well, either.