Portland State University

The prospect of my meeting with Peter Boghossian seemed to have angered the gods, so furious was the disruption to road and rail as I tried to make my way from Seattle to Portland. Torrential rain and flash floods summoned a ricochet of mudslides which abruptly terminated my Amtrak journey in Centralia, a middle-of-nowhere town in Washington State. There was no rail in either direction for at least forty-eight hours, no buses and seemingly just one Lyft — which I managed to slip into an hour later with a few other stranded passengers. Or perhaps it was the anger of very particular gods that rule over the Pacific Northwest, that hotbed of wokeness so concentrated you can feel it like toxic humidity in the air.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ That’s often the response of complacent academics when people like me draw attention to the erosion of free speech on campus. For instance, Lee C. Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, wrote an essay for the Atlantic last June entitled ‘Free Speech on Campus is Doing Just Fine, Thank You.’ But is everything rosy in the groves of academe? I thought I’d take this opportunity to look back on the year gone by and see if 2019 was a good or bad one for intellectual freedom in American higher education.