Really Berkeley? The hallowed home of the free speech movement has become the face of curtailing speech? And it did so while playing its assigned role in a Breitbart provocateur's performance art project? Oh well played, Berkely. Really. Well done.

The University of California, Berkeley's Republican club invited Milo Yiannopoulos, whose persistent stream of deliberate offensiveness got him banned from Twitter, to speak at the school. This ignited first a large (1,500+ people) and, according to the school's account, peaceful protest which was then joined by 150 or so anarchist agitators employing violent tactics. "This university was essentially invaded by more than 100 individuals clad in ninja-like uniforms who were armed and engaged in paramilitary tactics," a school spokesman told The New York Times. Ninjas!

The school system's police department canceled the event on grounds of public safety. The school issued a statement condemning the violence while noting that it had committed to the event in the first place in spite of the fact that "Yiannopoulos' views, tactics and rhetoric are profoundly contrary to those of the campus" because, well, that's how free speech works. You don't have to like it; you just can't silence it.

That violent protest is deplorable should go without saying. But even nonviolent efforts to bar an offensive clown like Yiannopoulos are disappointing. Come on, Berkeley students, have the courage of your convictions.

It called to mind a letter my father, the late historian and liberal activist Arthur Schlesinger Jr., wrote to the Harvard Crimson in 1953 when that school canceled scheduled appearances by a couple of now long-forgotten communists, novelist Howard Fast and actor Paul Robeson, who had starred in a film called "The Emperor Jones."

What in the world has gotten into the students of Harvard? ... What are students so frightened about? Is their faith in themselves and in democracy so feeble that they fear subversion from the dreary imbecilities of Howard Fast or from the cavortings of Paul Robeson as the Emperor Jones?

A year ago I had a no-quarter debate with Howard Fast before the Yale Political Union. I am happy to report that the Yale undergraduates seem to have survived the sight of Mr. Fast without fatal contamination [and]; that their sharp and intelligent questions showed how clearly they saw through his arguments. ... What has happened to this generation of Harvard men that they should flee in panic before such hopeless bores as the Fasts and the Robesons?

I gather that in these cases the students acted on their own, without orders or even hints from the faculty. It is a stirring commentary on the courage of this new generation that the faculties and governing bodies of a university should be more in favor of free speech than the students.

The same is true a hundredfold for free-speech bastion Berkeley, except for the fact that more than 100 faculty members signed a letter asking the school's dean, Nicholas Dirks, to cancel the event. Good for him for standing up for free expression.

Dad quoted a Harvard dean regarding an earlier controversy involving an unpopular speaker: "The world is full of dangerous ideas, and we are both naive and stupid if we believe that the way to prepare intelligent young men [Harvard was still technically an all-male school at the time] to face the world is trying to protect them from such ideas when they are in college," Dean Wilbur J. Bender had said. "Four years spent in an insulated nursery will produce gullible innocents, not tough-minded realists."

I don't have much to add to these trenchant sentiments other than to note that the whole idiotic affair couldn't have played more into Yiannopoulos' hands if he had scripted it himself. His shtick is to provoke with offense; he's on a college speaking tour for that purpose. The masked vigilantes who got the event canceled have provided him boundless publicity, further raised his profile and credibility with the alt-right troll movement – he was chased out of Berkeley by left-wing ninjas! – and thereby no doubt guaranteed another dozen speaking engagements. Even Twitter-Troll-in-Chief Donald Trump got involved, floating the idea of revoking federal funds for the school. (He can't.)

In the age of social media and instant communications, Berkeley protesters gave Yiannopoulos precisely what he was looking for. They played their assigned role in his show, giving he and his ilk video ammunition for their case that progressives oppose free speech. This must have made his year.

And if the protesters were truly concerned that his racist and misogynistic sentiments might find broadly receptive ground at their school, then he's not the problem they need to focus on but rather the symptom.