Thursday night in Greenwich Village, a woman let loose an obscenity-filled tirade against the police officers who were attempting to keep order outside New York University’s Kimmel Student Center, where College Republicans were hosting a speech by comedian Gavin McInnes. Screaming that President Trump’s supporters at the event were “Nazis,” the woman unleashed more than a dozen obscenities in less than two minutes. “Why are you here?” she screamed at the NYPD officers. “You’re not here to protect these students from Nazis. No, you’re not! This is completely [bleeped] up. And these students had to [bleeping] face them on their own. You should be ashamed of yourselves! You should be standing up to those Nazis!”

The idea that Republicans are Nazis from whom students need protection is widespread in academia, where the vast majority of professors are Democrats, and administrators impose “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” to stifle dissent against the prevailing left-wing orthodoxy. (See “The Cult of Social Justice,” Dec. 21, 2015.) Hillary Clinton’s defeat last November was a profound shock to many inside the campus bubble. Yale University canceled exams for students “traumatized” by the election. The University of Massachusetts offered “grief counseling” to students, with one official saying those with “marginalized identities” had suffered most from the campaign. At Virginia Tech the morning after the election, officials sent an email to students “waking up with fear, anxiety, concern, questions, and confusion among many other emotions,” directing them to campus services offering “support.” Did any universities offer counseling and support to Republican students after Mitt Romney lost in 2012? Of course not.

On the 21st-century campus, it’s conservatives who are truly “marginalized,” but nobody offers a “trigger warning” before discussing Keynesian economics in class, and there are no “safe spaces” for, say, a Christian student who wishes to defend Bible-based morality. Even at an allegedly Catholic school like Marquette University, political science professor John McAdams was threatened with firing when he defended a student’s right to express opposition to same-sex marriage. By contrast, Marquette administrators seem to have no problem with sociology professor Dawne Moon’s avowed identity as a “queer activist.” Nor does anyone at Marquette condemn Professor Moon’s assigning her sociology students selections from The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader and The Sex, Gender & Sexuality Reader, including “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity” and “Sexual Science and the Law: Regulating Sex — Reifying the Power of Heterosexual Men.”

Criticism of homosexuality is strictly forbidden in contemporary academia, but so also is the gay libertarian Milo Yiannopoulos. Last week’s riot in Berkeley forced the cancellation of Yiannopoulos’s scheduled speech at the University of California, and why? Yiannopoulos is pro-Trump, an opinion unacceptable to the radical mob at Berkeley. In the historic home of the 1964 Free Speech movement, it seems, no speech by Republicans is permitted. “Yiannopoulos and his repulsive demeanor never belonged here,” the student-run Daily Cal declared in an editorial. “He isn’t a productive member of society, and he certainly doesn’t reflect the type of respectful and educated discourse UC Berkeley promotes.” The “respectful and educated discourse” at Berkeley evidently includes a lot of vandalism and assault, however.

One day after the Berkeley riot, police in New York made 11 arrests during the wild demonstration outside the NYU event where Gavin McInnes spoke to the College Republicans. McInnes has been called the “godfather of hipsterdom” and frequently takes jabs at feminism and other forms of political correctness. He co-founded a group called “Proud Boys” that is about “Western chauvinism,” which has resulted in liberal journalists accusing McInnes of racism, even though the group’s other co-founder is black. Yet like Yiannopoulos, McInnes’s main offense is being pro-Trump. Liberals have decided Trump is Hitler, and the rowdy demonstrators at NYU seemed to believe that the College Republican event was a Nazi rally. This impression was heightened by protest signs (supplied by the Workers World Party, a notorious fringe Marxist group) with slogans like “Smash Fascism & White Supremacy.”

The woman yelling four-letter words at NYPD officers was not alone in thinking she was “standing up to Nazis,” she was just a bit more worked up about it. What struck many who watched the video of her hysterical tantrum, however, was that amid her screeching torrent of obscenities, she twice yelled: “I’m professor!” Internet sleuths soon identified her as Rebecca Goyette, an adjunct professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey. She describes her work as “a largely queer, fantasy paradigm,” exploring “the remotest ranges of the subconscious mind.” Professor Goyette last year staged an exhibit that included her fantasies of castrating Donald Trump.

Such are the “remotest reaches of the subconscious mind” of one academic. America used to put lunatics in mental institutions, but now we have turned our universities into asylums and put the lunatics in charge of them.