Portland, Ore.

I belong to Freethinkers of Portland State University, a skeptic student group. On Saturday we’re hosting a panel on diversity featuring James Damore, the Google employee who was fired last July for writing a memo expressing heterodox views about sex disparities in the company’s workforce.

We expected controversy. But we also got danger. The left-wing newspaper Willamette Week published an article with a false and inflammatory headline: “Tech Bro Fired from Google for Saying Women Are Biologically Unfit to Be Engineers Will Speak at PSU Next Month.” The subheadline inaccurately attributed to Mr. Damore the view that “women can’t do math.”

Campus activists called us misogynists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis. A person claiming to work for campus audiovisual services tweeted that he could break into our event through a back entrance and “literally turn the whole building off.” There were threats of violence. A Facebook user—it’s not clear if he’s connected to PSU—suggested he’d throw “active grenades” at Mr. Damore onstage. Campus police took these threats seriously enough that they denied our request for a larger venue, despite overwhelming interest.

PDX Women in Tech, a local activist group, proclaimed itself “disheartened and appalled” that we were “engaging in discourse without an opposing viewpoint.” If they’d asked us, they’d have known we invited every tenured and tenure-track professor from the women’s studies department and were rebuffed. Meantime, the administration and student government have organized three counterevents to challenge “the notion that women do not generate ideas”—something Mr. Damore has never claimed. Opponents also attempted to deny our event an audience by hoarding the free tickets and not using them.