Last night the social scientist Charles Murray came to the University of Michigan. Guess what happened next?

When my group, the American Enterprise Institute’s Michigan Executive Council, a student organization affiliated with the public policy think tank where Mr. Murray works, announced in early September that we were bringing him to talk about his most recent book, “Coming Apart,” it was immediately met with resistance from campus organizations. From there, things followed the now familiar script.

Various students groups threatened to shut down the event if we failed to do so ourselves. An op-ed in the school newspaper suggested that by extending this invitation, we were promulgating “alt-right” bigotry. The student government leadership put out a statement condemning Mr. Murray’s visit as “allowing a pseudo-academic to portray racism as ‘new ideas.’ ” One of my closest friends, a Republican, told me that he would not attend for fear of being labeled a white supremacist by his classmates.

My group, in partnership with the event’s co-sponsor, the University of Michigan College Republicans, was in constant contact with the university about how the school could best prepare for the “triggering” event of a speech by a 74-year-old academic. This is now the norm for Mr. Murray, ever since he spoke at Middlebury College in March. That night ended with Allison Stanger, the professor who interviewed him, in a neck brace after she was assaulted by protesters.