For leftists, by contrast, frustrated by the conservative politics of the Reagan-Bush era, universities offered an arena in which to try to continue a civil-rights struggle that had stalled nationally. But despite their relative liberalism, white-dominated universities still proved alienating and even hostile environments for many minority students. The result was that both right- and left-wing students often considered themselves victims. And the resulting clashes frequently showcased the worst of each side.

Twenty years later, something similar is happening on the subject of Islam. In recent weeks, Maher has gained national attention for making the kind of sweeping, derogatory generalizations about Muslims that campus conservatives gained national attention for making about African Americans a couple of decades ago. In the 1990s, campus conservatives presented African-American crime and poverty as a product purely of cultural pathology, ignoring white America’s centuries of racist violence and injustice. Today, Maher presents Muslim terrorism as purely a product of religious pathology, ignoring the tremendous ongoing violence the United States and its Western allies commit in majority-Muslim countries.

And today, as then, leftists are responding by trying to restrict free speech. Last week, students at Berkeley launched a petition aimed at preventing Maher from speaking at the university’s commencement this December. “Too many students are marginalized by his remarks and if the University were to bring this individual as a commencement speaker they would not be supporting these historically marginalized communities,” its authors explained. This spring, a protest prevented the Somali-born critic of Islam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, from speaking at Brandeis. More recently, Muslim students tried to restrict a speech of hers at Yale.

Once again, campuses are witnessing a clash of the supposedly victimized. Maher paints himself as a man bravely violating politically correct orthodoxy to tell truths about Islam that many American liberals fear acknowledging. Muslim students on campus want their campuses to be a refuge from what many consider the demonization and persecution of Muslims in post-9/11 America. And once again, the clash is bringing out the worst in both sides.

Underlying all this is the fact that, since 9/11, the United States has spent billions of dollars fighting wars in majority-Muslim countries. Thousands of Americans have died and America has killed many more. Yet more than a decade later, the United States is weaker and the countries in which we’ve fought are even more chaotic and violent. Neither Maher nor the Berkeley students who don’t want him to speak have much hope that this will improve. And until it does, America’s campus “debate” over Islam probably won’t either.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.