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Daniel Henninger at OpinionJournal reflects on "[t]he hateful things people say when words aren't allowed to hurt":



Wonder Land: How Our Age Dumbed Down Even Invective



Not more than three university presidents in America would likely disagree with any of that. Yet their campuses are the sources of the crudest political language heard anywhere. Perhaps the adults are responsible for infantilizing speech.



Their speech codes, and how they were enforced, made it clear that opinions about certain "highly charged topics" were verboten. Whole classes of people--women, native Americans, people of color--were immunized against being the subject of critical speech. Whether faculty or student, one had to be fastidious about one's words, or risk termination, public condemnation or expulsion.



Simultaneously, at the very moment that some speech was shut down, another, related political movement announced that "the personal is political" and made words its instrument. In this world, words stretched to support any imaginable argument. This movement insisted that the most quotidian, private corners of life--child rearing, sex, simple conversations--were in fact fodder for hard political debate and codification into rules or law.

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