Greg Lukianoff is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).

FIRE has dubbed the spring “disinvitation season,” and in an essay on the increasingly numerous campus protests of conservative speakers (including Condoleezza Rice at Rutgers), he goes on to explain why:

…That is the time, usually early in the spring, when students and faculty get together to demand that an invited guest speaker–usually a commencement speaker–be disinvited, because the students or faculty members disagree with something that speaker did, said, or believes.

This year, however, disinvitation season got off to an especially early start with professors at Rutgers University joining together to demand that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice be disinvited as their commencement speaker. In a letter to the university community sent late last week, the Rutgers administration made it clear that they had no intention of dis-inviting Rice. For those of us who believe that students should be exposed to a variety of viewpoints, this was a positive development. However, it would not be unprecedented for a university in Rutgers’ position to later on change its mind and decide to disinvite the speaker or just quietly encourage them to withdraw. Even when universities don’t capitulate to these demands, students have been known to organize to effectively silence a speaker via the “heckler’s veto”–most notoriously at Brown University, where students prevented former NYC Police Commissioner Ray Kelly from speaking last fall.

It’s hard to be sure, but after having watched disinvitation season for so many years now, it certainly seems to me that the push to get speakers disinvited is becoming more common, and the likelihood of those pushes succeeding is increasing. This isn’t just a hunch; I have been maintaining a growing list of about 120 speaker controversies over recent years, and it is certainly not exhaustive. It also includes numerous high-profile dis-invitations, or decisions by speakers to withdraw under pressure, such as Ben Carson, Geraldo Rivera, Robert Zoellick, Ann Coulter, Ben Stein, Meg Whitman, and James Franco, just to name a few.

…The remedy to this situation is largely cultural. We need students–and, sadly, in some cases faculty–to recognize that one of the defining characteristics of an educated person is a commitment to seeking out the intelligent person with whom they disagree for debate and discussion. If we work to inculcate this attitude into our students and on our college campuses, it would go a long way towards making our tedious culture war that much more bearable.

But if we don’t, and we continue to inadvertently cultivate the “expectation of confirmation” for students, we can only expect disinvitation season to get worse and worse every year, until universities decide that perhaps the only people they can invite to speak will be those who have nothing to say.