It’s Damon Linker Day around here, I guess. He’s been on fire since returning to regular column writing. I don’t always agree with him — I find his defense of the liberal nuns, for example, to be highly unpersuasive — but he’s writing punchy columns about important things. Several of you readers have been sending me stories about campus protests succeeding in getting campuses to disinvite planned speakers. I was going to write about this, but just saw that Damon got there already today. Here’s how his column starts:

Why do today’s college students, professors, and administrators hate powerful women?

That’s what first came to mind when I read that Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund, had withdrawn as commencement speaker at Smith College afterprotests by students and faculty. Which came about a week after Condoleezza Rice, the first African American woman to serve as U.S. secretary of State, backed out of receiving an honorary degree from and speaking at the Rutgers University commencement due to faculty objections. Which came just a few weeks after Brandeis University summarily withdrew its offer of an honorary degree for author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali after Muslim special interest groups denounced her for criticizing Islam’s treatment of women.

This isn’t about free speech. Universities are free to invite (and then rudely disinvite) anyone they want to their campuses. No one has a right to don a cap and gown and address an audience of thousands under the auspices of an institution of higher learning.

What this is about is the tyranny of right-thinking moralism on college campuses — and how it’s facilitated by the brittleness of academic sanctimony, the preciousness of a certain type of student activism, and the craven financial calculus of university administrators.

Read the whole thing. It’s powerfully argued. Damon says in each case, liberal students, professors, and administrators yielded to “a longing to simplify the world, to wish away our conflicts and deny the need to get one’s hands dirty. Fighting for the rights of women can be morally messy. The same can be said of serving as America’s leading diplomat. And overseeing the global economy.”

In pursuing this “error has no rights” degree of purity, these colleges are making themselves stupider. Besides, who wants to go to a college where brilliant, accomplished, and interesting people are unwelcome to present their ideas because they violate some princess-and-the-pea notion of morality? Colleges are not seminaries or religious orders.

By the way, does anybody think that the new mandated “Check Your Privilege” class at Harvard is going to be anything other than an indoctrination in left-wing cultural politics?

UPDATE: Great comment from a liberal reader:

I’m Caucasian. But I live in rural Appalachia. The arguments about white privilege don’t really apply to people like me. Check my privilege?? What privilege? Rural Appalachians have been exploited and marginalized for centuries starting with the British and continuing down through the the present day when Appalachian have been exploited by the coal companies and the forestry companies who rape the land and poison the water. People front his region have to fight and scratch their way up the socioeconomic ladder too. Every measure of social progress and health care reveals that rural Appalachians are at the bottom of the heap. Privilege?? Just for once I like to see some privilege in this region.