MEGAN MCARDLE: No wonder the right distrusts academia. It has turned downright hostile to conservatism.

So why, just in the last couple of years, would conservatives turn against colleges with a vengeance?

What’s changed, I submit, is that colleges have readily supplied conservatives with images of an institution that is not merely left-leaning, but actively hostile to conservatives, as conservative speech on campus has increasingly been threatened. It started with students pressing for speakers to be disinvited from graduation speeches — sometimes liberals, but often conservatives. Then angry minorities were allowed to shut down conservative speeches with increasingly raucous protests that eventually turned to violence. And when violence occurred, schools seemed noticeably uninterested in identifying or punishing the people who committed it.

Indeed, schools’ responses to leftists’ riots have been: to make it maximally inconvenient for conservatives to speak (or be heard); to deliver a slap on the wrist against violent protests; and to allow students to corner, bully and imprecate upon professors.

Academia is a left-wing institution, and I suspect that when the people in charge of it look at left-wing protesters, they see basically good-hearted kids who are overexuberant in their pursuit of the common good. And who wants to wreck the lives of a nice kid who made a bad mistake out of the best possible motives?

Whatever the reason that this has been allowed to happen, the picture that emerges from these events is of an academia where orderly conservatives are unwelcome, but disorderly — even violent — leftists are tolerated. No wonder conservatives’ opinion of academia is falling.

Compare the welcome that the socialist Senator Bernie Sanders received at fundamentalist Liberty College to the chaos when right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos spoke at Berkeley. If Sanders had gotten the Milo treatment, liberals might start to question whether academia is an unalloyed good.