But according to an essay in Bloomberg View last week by Stephen Carter, a professor of law at Yale, the impulse<br />to squelch upsetting words with “odious behavior” is so common “that it’s tempting to greet it with a shrug.”<br />“The downshouters will go on behaving deplorably,” Carter wrote, “and reminding the rest of us<br />that the true harbinger of an authoritarian future lives not in the White House but in the groves of academe.”<br />I wouldn’t go that far.<br />“When something becomes a religion, we don’t choose the actions<br />that are most likely to solve the problem,” said Haidt, the author of the 2012 best seller “The Righteous Mind” and a professor at New York University.<br />The Dangerous Safety of College -<br />The moral of the recent melee at Middlebury College, where students shouted down<br />and chased away a controversial social scientist, isn’t just about free speech, though that’s the rubric under which the ugly incident has been tucked.<br />“Certain things are not to be discussed,” said John McWhorter, a Columbia University professor who teaches linguistics and philosophy, speaking of a rigid political correctness<br />that transcends college campuses but that he is especially disturbed to see there.<br />Many jammed the auditorium where he was supposed to be interviewed — by, mind you, a liberal professor — and stood with their backs to him.