George Orwell was a good writer but he never could have imagined academia today.

Our friend Hans Bader writes at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

University of California Dean: Academic Freedom Makes Students “Feel Unsafe”

Recently, the dean of the School of Social Welfare at the University of California at Berkeley condemned a professor’s constitutionally protected remarks, including but not limited to his mention of black-on-black crime at a Black Lives Matter event. A complaint has also apparently been filed against the professor with the Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination.

Rather than defending academic freedom, Dean Jeffrey Edelson said “we deeply regret the reported incident” involving Steven Segal, a tenured professor, who has taught at Berkeley for more than 40 years and is world-renowned for his research on mental illness. Worse, the dean said that his remarks “made the classroom environment feel unsafe” for the complaining students. The dean reportedly set up a “shadow class” for students offended by the professor’s remarks: “Students in Segal’s class were offered an alternate section” with “a different professor.”

The University’s overreaction to Professor Segal’s speech was so absurd that a former head of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights told me that what occurred at the University of California “could just as easily be a Saturday Night Live skit.”

But it also sets a very bad precedent for academic freedom. Why are taxpayers paying to subsidize a school of social work whose officials exhibit so little common sense—and so much disdain for constitutional free speech guarantees?