Humphreys was so unpersuaded by “The Glaring Evidence That Free Speech Is Threatened on Campus” that he cited it this week in a contemptuously dismissive rebuttal posted at Reality Based Community and The Washington Monthly. He began with an anecdote.

On a brisk autumn evening at Stanford University, he chanced upon two acquaintances, a retired Eastern European diplomat and a female graduate student. Humphreys shook hands with the diplomat, who was wearing leather gloves, then introduced the diplomat to the grad student. The diplomat removed his gloves to shake her hand—and the graduate student did not take offense that he did so.

“After he departed, I said I had never seen a man take off a glove before shaking a woman’s hand and asked the student if she had or if she knew whence the custom came,” Humphreys wrote. “She smiled and responded ‘I really don’t know; maybe they do that where he’s from. But he’s a sweet old man and I could tell it was his way of being gallant.’”

For Humphreys, that anecdote is a useful corrective.

“If you have been reading Conor Friedersdorf’s or Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s writings about campus culture in The Atlantic,” he wrote, you’d have thought that “the women recoiled from the gendered micro-aggression and lambasted the diplomat.” But the encounter as it really unfolded represents “what I have seen over and over again from students for decades,” he wrote. “A spirit of common humanity and a tolerance for different ways of acting and thinking. People come to my university from all countries and all backgrounds with a huge range of beliefs and customs. Yet I have never (and I do mean never) witnessed anything on campus suggesting that the atmosphere of widespread intolerance, suspicion and emotional fragility that I keep reading about in The Atlantic actually exists.”

Sure, he added, “some students now and then have goofy ideas or act in rude ways,” but he recalls that “being just as much the case when I was a student 30 years ago.”(For what it’s worth, free speech on campus was certainly threatened then, too.)

He concluded with paragraphs that treat the distinct questions of whether speech is threatened and whether today’s students are awful as though they are the same:

I have asked many colleagues and students at my university and at other universities this two-part question “Have you read how students today are coddled, intolerant, whiny, narrow-minded prigs and do you yourself have any experience at all of this?”Everyone has answered yes to the first part of the question and all but a handful have answered no to the second. I thus remain dubious that the heavily recycled grab bag of anecdotes I keep hearing from Conor Friedersdorf and company establish that universities have suddenly become hell-holes of epistemic closure, Maoist impulses and mattress wallpaper. Repeating dramatic anecdotes does not make them more representative of the experiences of the over 15 million students at our country’s over 4,500 colleges and universities.

Humphreys did not quote any of my actual work in his article, or when he queried his colleagues. Had he done so, he might have realized that I think more highly of their cohort than he led readers to believe, that I believe the most alarming “bottom-up” transgressions against free speech to be the work of a small minority of students, and that even when writing about the most egregiously illiberal student behavior, I include passages like this one, written about events last year at Yale:

The purpose of writing about their missteps now is not to condemn these students. Their young lives are tremendously impressive by any reasonable measure. They are unfortunate to live in an era in which the normal mistakes of youth are unusually visible. To keep the focus where it belongs I won’t be naming any of them here.The focus belongs on the flawed ideas that they’ve absorbed. Everyone invested in how the elites of tomorrow are being acculturated should understand, as best they can, how so many cognitively privileged, ordinarily kind, seemingly well-intentioned young people could lash out with such flagrant intolerance.

With regard to the overall threat to speech, it is strange to be accused of trafficking only in dramatic anecdotes when my article includes an alphabetical list of institutions with written codes that infringe on speech, with links to source material.