Today wealthy donors back groups like the Intercollegiate Studies Institute: the Bradley Foundation, the Scaife family foundations and the Koch brothers’ DonorsTrust ( for donors who don’t want to go public) that funnel money to, among others, the David Horowitz Freedom Center (whose “academic bill of rights” would monitor professors’ syllabuses for “balance”) and Campus Watch, which tracks comments on the Middle East.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which has won more than $1 million from the Bradley Foundation and half a million dollars from DonorsTrust, claims to be standing up for traditional liberal values. Its enemies are the campus Jacobins, who, it claims, are destroying the “marketplace of ideas” that alumni remember so fondly.

Conservatives used to remind us that what the Constitution protects in speech, civil society modulates; freedom requires self-restraint and respect for others, not the hurling of scare words. Yet now their selectively legalistic “free speech” strategy helps turn collegial contentions into rhetorical battlefields by hyping and even provoking progressive offenders.

The reason is that conservatives’ yearning for ordered liberty is being debased not by liberals but by the casino-like financing and predatory lending and marketing of a “dynamic capitalist economy.” Think of Donald J. Trump’s “free speech” rampages (with attacks just like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s on “political correctness”), the Senate’s lockjaw against open hearings, and market-driven entertainment that encourages real violence. Shaming undergraduates who are upset by all this and assailing deans who must cope with them have a chilling effect on “no strings attached” alumni generosity like Mr. Johnston’s, which shielded free inquiry from donors with more mercenary and ideological agendas.

A college is a civil society on training wheels. Students, away from home and in an “adult” society for the first time, may try out defensive ethno-racial flag waving, religious and political dogmas, athletic and fraternal self-segregation, and premature career-ladder climbing. They may scare one another a little, but they also learn to stand up for themselves.

If collegiate civil societies are lurching into ditches as often now as the “free speech” campaign claims, that’s partly because the larger society is, too. Yes, some students are as intemperate as the Republican presidential nominee, and some deans accommodate them. Their behavior may not be your daddy’s liberalism, but what their outraged critics are selling isn’t his conservatism, either.