I can’t say that I was surprised when I heard that the latest chapter of our perpetual conversation about campus politics was playing out at Wesleyan University. Having spent my childhood there, I knew enough to know that such a controversy was always a possibility. But I must admit disappointment when I heard the particular contours of this latest story. Activists at Wesleyan have pushed the university to defund the Argus, the school’s main newspaper, in response to a commentary that questioned the tactics of the Black Lives Matter movement. The piece in question suggested that the BLM movement was responsible for cop killings, and questioned whether its tactics were actually effective in creating change. Campus activists, in turn, started a petition to defund the paper, which was signed by some 170 students—not a large number, even on a campus of 2,900 undergraduates, but still concerning. I am not disappointed that students have reacted, forcefully, in this way. I am disappointed in how they have reacted, and how much campus life have changed there since my childhood—a change the reflects a broader evolution of college politics that troubles so many.

Even those who agree entirely with the presumed politics of campus activists should be concerned.

The 1990s were a heady time to grow up at Wes, as I did as the son of a professor of theater. The campus was, then as now, known as a haven for proud weirdos, artists, and free thinkers of every stripe. Indeed, from my vantage, the campus was likely even crazier then than it is today. (A perpetual Wesleyan student complaint is that the administration is trying to de-weird the university, a claim that has perhaps been more accurate recently than it traditionally has been.) The campus in those days, like today, was bustling with activists ready to protest at a moment’s notice And yet there were some key differences then as compared to now, and they are not entirely healthy. Even those who agree entirely with the presumed politics of campus activists should be concerned.

To understand what the campus was like in those days, I would point you to the 1994 film PCU—Politically Correct University—written by Zach Penn, a Wesleyan graduate. The film is simultaneously a parody and a celebration of early-‘90s campus political culture, depicting a thinly veiled Wesleyan stand-in as a hive of overlapping political cultures, each trying to outdo each other in radicalism, often to the point of cluelessness. (A representative figure in the film shouts “Free Nelson Mandela!,” only to be informed that the legendary political prisoner had already been freed.) Many people take the film for a ruthless critique, but if you knew Wes in those days, you’d know that there’s something loving about the portrayal as well. When I show the film to friends I always tell them: this movie might be a parody, but it’s barely an exaggeration. Students chasing down others for putting a nail in a tree amounts to documentary, in this context.

I have thought about Wesleyan students often, in recent years, as the endless debate about political freedom on campus has gone from a simmer to a boil. Now, with the Argus controversy, that debate has come home. Many would assume, given that I have expressed concerns with campus political activism in the past, that I would have only derision for the student activists I grew up around. And yet I look back on them with fondness; their passion and their intelligence were obvious. As a child I found them, in general, impossibly cool: heady, stylish, political. They talked to my father the way that grownups talk to each other, and I found that fascinating and intimidating. As I got older, I began to see their abundant failings alongside that magic, and particularly in regards to their politics—their hypocrisy, their fickleness, their alienating righteousness. (I myself could never have gotten into Wes, given my high school grades, and attended a public university elsewhere in Connecticut.)

Stories about the limits of their egalitarianism, among us locals, ran rampant. Faculty brats like me got something like a pass, but there was no question that residents of the town in which Wesleyan was so centrally located were worthy of only offhand disinterest. The same students who would decry the inequalities of racism and sexism would drop the word “townie” like a comma, not seeming to understand that in its class implications, the term represented everything they were fighting against. They would march against apartheid but would generally not go much farther north than Washington Street, a loose border for one of the black parts of town. They would speak out against exploitation of low-wage workers, but would treat my teenage waiter friends horribly. My friend Alex tells the story of how, at a Wesleyan party, he chatted with a woman for 20 minutes before she asked him what he was studying. When he told her he in fact was a local, not a student, she wordlessly turned around and walked away, literally turning his back to him without so much as a goodbye or an explanation. Things were like that. These were not quite isolated incidents, but of course there were plenty of Wes students who were far more thoughtful and consistent in their politics. Some of them became great political teachers for me. It’s just that the campus social culture seemed to make this kind of callousness easier, rather than harder.