Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg did more than give a terrific speech last week at the Harvard commencement; he delivered an eloquent, well-timed, and much-needed rejoinder to the national push—well, national but mainly on elite campuses—by students and faculty to ban or repress just about every viewpoint and person that doesn't conform to conventional leftist-orthodoxies. This now includes not only blocking potentially controversial speakers (like the notorious IMF head Christine Lagarde) but also demanding that college professors and administrators alert their students before exposing them to anything they might find objectionable or upsetting.
I wrote about this on May 21 in Politico Magazine, but Bloomberg said it better. He said it in the citadel of the liberal intelligentsia. And, of course, he's a heckuva lot more influential! As hizzoner bluntly put it, "A university's obligation is not to teach students what to think but to teach students how to think. And that requires listening to the other side."
