How the latest wave of college student protests is rooted in thuggery, not principles.

Peter Roff writes at U.S. News and World Report:

Thuggery, Not Principled Protests

Though they might like to think otherwise, today’s college demonstrators are far different from those who occupied academic offices and open spaces during the youth revolt of the late 1960s. Call the difference a matter of noble idealism versus individual interest, of selfless concern instead of selfish conceit.

At Dartmouth College this week, protestors took over the library, hurled profane epithets at students there studying and, according to several reports, became violent. According to the Dartmouth Review, male and female students alike “were pushed and shoved” by demonstrators yelling “If we can’t have it, shut it down!” This is not speaking truth to power; it is thuggery and should not be tolerated.

The activists who stormed the campuses 50 years ago at a time when both Clintons were still young whelps had embraced a cause they believed to be larger than any one of them. They wanted to stop the draft and the war in Vietnam and, as some later historians have it, they succeeded. They certainly helped drive Lyndon Johnson from the White House four years after he’d won his own term of office in a genuine landslide.