Every attempt to shut down campus speech should trigger an independent investigation asking two questions:
1) Did administrators do anything to stop the censorship?
2) Did administrators do anything to encourage, excuse, or facilitate it?
Students are responsible for their own actions. But the deeper scandal is administrative complicity.
In a healthy university, the answer to right-wing demands to fire a professor would be: “No way.” And the answer to left-wing attempts to shut down a speaker would be: “Not on my watch.”
Does that sound fanciful? At this point, probably. Because it has become hard to imagine administrators actually acting this way.
The dirty little secret is that too many of them have enabled this for years. Some are hired into ideological jobs built around policing speech, running BRTs, and managing “harm” rather than protecting open inquiry. Sometimes the damage comes through omission: refusing to punish obvious censorship. Sometimes it comes through commission, as at Stanford Law School several years ago, when administrators actively helped the shutdown along. Here, it looks like a combination of both.