The last few years have been explosive ones for American colleges and universities. Student protests over controversial speakers and events—the most extreme example involving white supremacists terrorizing the University of Virginia—seem to have become a standard part of the undergraduate experience. Not since the 1970s has activism been so visible and, as the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Berkeley, California, indicate, potentially dangerous.
As trouble intensified on collegiate quads between late 2016 and 2018, many wondered if university officials should have been better prepared to handle the spate of public controversies. That criticism was put forth most succinctly by University of Missouri professor Ben Trachtenberg, in his conversation last year with Harvard EdChat:…