The intolerance of the academic left

Intolerance 101

By Post Editorial Board

October 12, 2014 | 6:44am

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Having a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist and noted TV commentator as a guest speaker would normally be considered a coup for an academic institution. But not if you’re Scripps College — and not if that speaker is George Will. 

Consider this a teachable moment, one that speaks volumes about the increasing intolerance on American campuses to honest and open ­debate.

Scripps had invited Will as part of an annual program designed to present the notoriously liberal all-women’s college with a token conservative speaker.

But when the Washington Post pundit (whose column also appears on these pages) wrote a piece questioning the Obama administration’s statistics on campus sexual assaults, the predictable uproar ensued — and the liberal college, just as predictably, responded by closing its students to George Will’s arguments.

Scripps President Lori Bettison-Varga on Wednesday said Will was disinvited because sexual assault “is too important to be trivialized in a political debate or wrapped into a celebrity controversy.” We suspect George Will would agree, albeit for entirely different reasons.

As Will himself said after four US senators publicly denounced his column, “I think I take sexual assault much more seriously than you. Which is why I worry about definitions of that category of that crime that might, by their breadth, tend to trivialize it.”

Agree with Will’s position or not, it’s an entirely legitimate argument, and one that Scripps students would benefit from hearing and debating with him, if they feel so strongly. In other words, challenge Will to defend his position — don’t ban him from expressing it.

These days, however, the ears of our precious college students are thought by their liberal guardians to be so delicate they must be guarded from hearing any voice suggesting there might be other views. So when conservative speech makes liberals indignant, their answer is simply to ban it.

Maybe Scripps should follow the lead of Goddard College and book Mumia Abu-Jamal in Will’s place. 

Plainly on our campuses, words of advice from a convicted cop-killer are deemed far more wise and welcome than those of a prize-winning conservative columnist.