The truth is that campus politics have always elicited a fierce reaction from critics who say that the rabble-rousers are undermining institutions and preventing a free flow of debates. This was the very argument made against student radicals in the 1960s as they pushed for free speech on campus, advocated for civil rights, and mobilized against the war.

Some senior liberal faculty, many of whom would later become neo-conservatives, blasted them for their distrust of institutions. Others worried that the younger students were moving too far away from core issues that had animated the party since the New Deal. Yet today, many valorize many of the causes that they pushed for. Without those “rabble rousers” we might not have had the very necessary and important pressure against a disastrous war in Vietnam. I heard the same arguments, informally, from liberal professors during my own college education in the 1980s when Reaganite conservative students started to organize.

Today, I think there are many students who are interested in what is dismissed as “identity politics.” I prefer to think of this as the politics of social justice. Much of the debates, as you argue, do involve racism and sexism, as well as xenophobia, which in my mind are not “ill-defined” terms, but very serious forms of discrimination with deep institutional and cultural roots within the U.S. Many students and faculty have taken seriously the work of social scientists and historians who have shown how these and other forms of discrimination are deeply imbedded in the organization as well as culture of institutions such as those of higher education. To ignore this seems ahistorical. When students turn our attention to expanding the kind of curricular discussions that are available, the diversity of the faculty, and questioning the persons we seek to memorialize, those are very legitimate questions that grow out of the protests from the 1960s.

They are not whitewashing intellectual inquiry—but just the opposite. Rather than curtailing debate, many students (of course not all) are actually seeking deeper engagement with our history and the way our education functions. I personally am happy that they are paying attention. While some protests against speakers take ugly turns, something that is not particular to our current era, much of the drive to challenge figures invited to campus shows that students are actually paying attention and listening. To compare most of this either to German universities in the 1930s or the McCarthyite era seems to be off-base, and in some ways, recreating that kind of hysteria rather than demanding open dialogue.

Moreover, we need to acknowledge there are legitimate reasons to criticize the way our universities work. While I agree it is important to keep the classroom open as an arena of free flowing ideas, that does not mean we can’t accept students who are thinking and debating the world around them—just as students have done for decades. African American students have rightly raised concerns about how they are treated on campus, whether by campus police or simply in informal social settings. There have been debates that include positions, many of which I disagree with, about how universities invest their money or for thinking about the physical structure of higher learning so as to create the most inviting atmosphere for diverse, pluralistic, and robust debate. The need to take seriously the way university practices impact the environment is not frivolous but rather urgent.