IT DID SO WITH ENCOURAGEMENT FROM THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION: The Campus Left Grew More Radical During the Obama Years.

In recent years, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the number of speech codes has declined, but new means of silencing provocative speech have emerged. Among them: “Disinvitation attempts,” or protests pressuring campus administrations to bar unpopular political figures from coming to campus after they had been invited to speak to a graduating class or student group (or drive them from campus once they have arrived).

Heterodox Academy, a non-partisan group of faculty dedicated to preserving viewpoint diversity in academia, has produced data about the frequency of such instances over the last 16 years. Their key findings: Efforts to bar speakers from campus appear to be on the upswing, and, since the beginning of the Obama years, it has been the campus Left that has been doing most of the disinviting.

Why the surge in left-wing activity since 2009? One possible factor is that the Obama administration’s Office for Civil Rights in Education has gone all-in for the activists, pursuing a hard-line interpretation of Title IX and rarely even playing lip service to freedom of speech. So the campus Left felt, correctly, that the federal government had its back.

Well, I think that’s changed. And I hope that Attorney General Sessions will prosecute conspiracies to deprive people of their constitutional rights to the full extent of the law.