We regularly report about the assault on independent/conservative speech on today’s college campuses.

Minding the Campus contributor Fred Siegel reviews how the restrictions on campus free speech developed over the past few decades.

John Dewey said the job of education was to free students from the intellectual captivity imposed by “village truths,” the groupthink version of reality they had grown up with. But the irony now is that liberalism, once created in opposition to small-town traditionalism, has generated its own all-encompassing “village truths” creating conformism on today’s campus.

Students are now subject to a curriculum watered down by political correctness. So it comes as news to even well-read young people that there once was an anti-Communism and anti-Stalinism of the left in America. It was a tradition upheld by people like the literary critic and Yiddishist Irving Howe and the historian Eugene Genovese. But Howe’s and Genovese’s anti-Stalinism made them objects of enmity for the anti-anti-Communists of the New Left, who have dominated academia for the past three decades. The New Left aped the Communists by shutting down all campus debate, and in so doing, laid the groundwork for political correctness.

…The fight between those looking to politicize the campus and those opposed was largely decided by the events of the spring of 1970, a year with more than 3,000 left-wing bombings. In quick succession, we saw Earth Day, the most widespread demonstration in US history; the trial of the Black Panthers for killing one of their own; Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia; and the Kent State tragedy. All these produced widespread campus strikes in which one-time liberals melded into leftists.

At Amherst, the prominent M.I.T. American Studies professor Leo Marx told the striking students: “How can we go out into the streets and talk to the people who are so prejudiced against us?” “This strike is a signal that the present politics of the American government, if persisted in, will eventually destroy the structure of higher education in America.” He described America as a “society devoted to war and racism and imperialism.”

By 1972 when Vietnam was de-escalating and the urban rioting had for the most part died down, James Q, Wilson wrote that “the list of subjects that cannot be discussed…in a free and open form (on campus) has grown steadily, and now includes the war in Vietnam, public policy toward urban ghettos, the relationship of intelligence and heredity and the role of corporations in certain overseas regimes.

The substantive commitment to victims of American society overwhelmed the former commitment to academic life organized around open debates. Sides had been chosen up and there was little to debate. The question of what was true was replaced by the question of which side you were on.