Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley has been re-invited but the damage done by the controversy was unavoidable for Virginia Tech.

Heat Street reports.

Exclusive: Internal Documents Show Backlash Over Virginia Tech’s Disinvitation of Jason Riley

Earlier this year, Virginia Tech’s business school invited conservative commentator Jason Riley to speak to its students. Then suddenly, 10 days later, Riley, the author of a controversial book about race, received an email informing him the lecture was off. The department head and others on campus were “worried about more protests from the looney left if you were to give the lecture,” the email said.

But instead of helping the university avert a backlash, retracting the invitation actually sparked one—with a firestorm of negative media coverage and threats to cancel donations.

To get a window onto the conversation behind the scenes as the school awkwardly invited, disinvited and finally reinvited Riley, a contributor to the Wall Street Journal and senior fellow for the Manhattan Institute, Heat Street asked for hundreds of pages of Virginia Tech correspondence around the time of the controversy.

There’s a lesson in here for colleges about the storm that can be unleashed when they try to censor the dialogue on campus. And Virginia Tech is far from alone: The number of colleges that have disinvited speakers has steadily increased since 2000, according to figures from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which tracks such incidents.