This is from The Wall Street Journal where, presumably, the editors and journalists agree with what they are reporting on. The report discusses a statement of principles issued by a number of academics following the incident described at the start of the story.

On Thursday roughly 100 of our 2,500 students prevented a controversial visiting speaker, Charles Murray, from communicating with his audience on the campus of Middlebury College. Mr. Murray was silenced by loud chants and foot-stomping; the commotion lasted nearly half an hour before college officials moved him to a private room to deliver his address into a camera. But even the simulcast to the auditorium was silenced by more protests and multiple fire alarms.

As Mr. Murray was leaving, a group of as-yet-unidentified assailants mobbed him and seriously injured one of our faculty colleagues. In view of these unacceptable acts, we have produced a document stating core principles that seem to us unassailable in the context of higher education within a free society. Many colleagues have joined us by signing their names to this document; the full list of signatories is available online.

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The principles are as follows:

Genuine higher learning is possible only where free, reasoned, and civil speech and discussion are respected.

Only through the contest of clashing viewpoints do we have any hope of replacing mere opinion with knowledge.

The incivility and coarseness that characterize so much of American politics and culture cannot justify a response of incivility and coarseness on the college campus.

The impossibility of attaining a perfectly egalitarian sphere of free discourse can never justify efforts to silence speech and debate.

Exposure to controversial points of view does not constitute violence.

Students have the right to challenge and even to protest non-disruptively the views of their professors and guest speakers.

A protest that prevents campus speakers from communicating with their audience is a coercive act.

No group of professors or students has the right to act as final arbiter of the opinions that students may entertain.

No group of professors or students has the right to determine for the entire community that a question is closed for discussion.

The purpose of college is not to make faculty or students comfortable in their opinions and prejudices.

The purpose of education is not the promotion of any particular political or social agenda.

The primary purpose of higher education is the cultivation of the mind, thus allowing for intelligence to do the hard work of assimilating and sorting information and drawing rational conclusions.

A good education produces modesty with respect to our own intellectual powers and opinions as well as openness to considering contrary views.

All our students possess the strength, in head and in heart, to consider and evaluate challenging opinions from every quarter.

We are steadfast in our purpose to provide all current and future students an education on this model, and we encourage our colleagues at colleges across the country to do the same.

The election results, the Superbowl and now the Academy Award results apparently lead to the conclusion DID THE OSCARS JUST PROVE THAT WE ARE LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION?. From The New Yorker.

Once this insight is offered, it must be said, everything else begins to fall in order. The recent Super Bowl, for instance. The result, bizarre on the surface—with that unprecedented and impossible comeback complete with razzle-dazzle catches and completely blown coverages and defensive breakdowns—makes no sense at all in the “real” world. Doesn’t happen. But it is exactly what you expect to happen when a teen-ager and his middle-aged father exchange controllers in the EA Sports video-game version: the father stabs and pushes the buttons desperately while the kid makes one play after another, and twenty-five-point leads are erased in minutes, and in just that way—with ridiculous ease on the one side and chicken-with-its-head-cut-off panic infecting the other. What happened, then, one realizes with last-five-minutes-of-“The Twilight Zone” logic, is obvious: sometime in the third quarter, the omniscient alien or supercomputer that was “playing” the Patriots exchanged his controller with his teen-age offspring, or newer model, with the unbelievable result we saw.

There may be not merely a glitch in the Matrix. There may be a Loki, a prankster, suddenly running it. After all, the same kind of thing seemed to happen on Election Day: the program was all set, and then some mischievous overlord—whether alien or artificial intelligence doesn’t matter—said, “Well, what if he did win? How would they react?” “You can’t do that to them,” the wiser, older Architect said. “Oh, c’mon,” the kid said. “It’ll be funny. Let’s see what they do!” And then it happened. We seem to be living within a kind of adolescent rebellion on the part of the controllers of the video game we’re trapped in, who are doing this for their strange idea of fun.

So why worry? Wait for the reset and you can have the universe just the way you like it.

Sunday morning so thought I would look at the paper and there we have this column by PVO on Political discourse coarsened by reactionary war against ‘elites’. It’s not every reactionary who becomes the wave of the future, but there is this possibility in DJT. It is a bit old timey, but let me take you back to what I still think makes a lot of sense:

The circulation of elite is a theory of regime change described by Italian social scientist Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923). Changes of regime, revolutions, and so on occur not when rulers are overthrown from below, but when one elite replaces another.

There will always be leaders in every society and they will come from a variety of directions and use different means to hold on when challenged. But this is the essence of what PVO has to say:

A book by American professor Tom Nichols titled The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, explores how and why modern society has embraced such a lowbrow approach. [My bolding]

Let me take my own area of expertise, economics. You can certainly accuse me of campaigning against modern textbook theory which, so far as I can see, has brought our economies very low although making some people very rich. Go back to the first civilisations and you will see this everywhere you go. There are some few who are very rich and there are others who are not. The thing about our societies in the West is that those who are not do very very well by historical standards. But if your expertise is founded on the belief that increased aggregate demand and higher public spending are good for growth and employment, then your expertise, in my view, is junk science.

And the fact is, there is a lot of that kind of stuff around at the moment, with agw as large a danger to our communal wealth and well being as I have ever seen. So what does PVO say about that?

Climate change scientists might be the specialists when it comes to assessing global warming, and I’ll defer to their judgment rather than embrace the conspiracy theories of polemicists who dispute the evidence. But when climate scientists seek to influence policy mechanisms for addressing climate change, they move outside their area of expertise. Scientists recommending how best to structure tax or energy trading systems is akin to me offering medical advice: buyer beware. [My bolding again]

Those lowbrow polemicists attacking our elites who indulge in various forms of crony capitalism as they sell us massively government-subsidised wind farms and solar panels may actually have a point, and even more so if you think that these very same elites want to open our borders to anyone who decides to show up.