The NY Times published an opinion piece by a Princeton senior named Adam Hoffman. Hoffman writes that he’s heard there was a time before he was born when conservatives could get a relatively respectful hearing on campus and most students saw politics as something that could be separated from life in general. But that’s not how it is anymore. Princeton like every other campus has moved to the left and is now a place openly hostile to conservatives.

“Princeton has become a much more politicized place over the last 10 years,” said Thomas Kelly, a philosophy professor. It’s also become more progressive. Diversity training sessions blatantly endorse progressive ideas: Espousing a colorblind ideal, for example, is deemed a “microinvalidation.” Bureaucrats police conduct and speech. Many programs cater to left-wing causes.

For those on the right, the experience is alienating. The typical American’s views on gender ideology or American history are often irrelevant to his or her day-to-day life. But for the conservative college student, life is punctuated by political checkpoints. Classes may begin with requests for “preferred pronouns” or “land acknowledgments.” A student who jokes about the wrong subject might face social punishment. All students should welcome challenges to their most cherished beliefs, but from what I’ve seen on campus, students are not invited to debate; they are expected to conform.

And those who challenge liberal pieties can face real repercussions. Because a Princeton student defended an unpopular opinion about policing in a private conversation, she was pushed out of her leadership position on a sports team.

Every word of that rings true, especially the bit about the left not being interested in debate but in conformity. This is the woke approach. You can’t accomplish anything with “the master’s tools” and all of that. You either do what’s expected of you or you’re part of the problem. And if you’re part of the problem then you should be silenced by any means necessary.

Of course it’s much easier to go with the flow and join the progressive herd on campus but Hoffman says he has seen the aggressive tactics of progressives backfire. Some moderate and right-leaning students don’t react well to being forced against a wall by leftist dogma.

The political journey of Rebekah Adams, a friend and recent graduate, is illustrative. She arrived at Princeton as a self-described moderate. Rebekah, the daughter of a Black Guyanese immigrant father, became frustrated by conversations about race on campus. “I couldn’t bring nuance to the conversation about police brutality,” she told me.

Rebekah says she faced backlash from classmates because of her views and eventually embraced a conservative political identity. She began writing for The Princeton Tory, a journal of conservative thought, on hot-button issues like Israel and started campaigning for free speech on campus. She described a process of “learning how to think for myself.”

Hoffman’s column has brought out other like-minded people in the comments. Here’s the top comment:

I am a liberal who, after working for nearly 50 years in politics, is teaching at a local college this semester. The DEI hoops through which I have had to jump as an adjunct are staggering, including a two-hour online course – with quizzes – that was so sanctimonious and invasive that I feared my answers to questions like “Have you ever judged someone because of the color of their skin?” were being recorded for nefarious purposes in some bizarre woke cloud! Even worse, all students have to take this course too.

One of my students, openly a conservative, tells me he is afraid to talk to anyone. This is pretty scary: Instead of jamming the most extreme principles of “woke” down the throats of college students, we should be encouraging them to find common ground – and teaching them how.

Another example:

Extremely well-written and heartfelt. I am politically left wing but completely agree with his analysis. I place a lot of the blame at the feet of college administrators who have adopted a consumer driven – “the customer is always right” — approach that have left them feckless and bereft of an ethical compass.

One hopes that pendulum is starting to swing the other way. In the meantime, I hope you maintain your integrity – and humanity — and resist the lure of radical right .

And another from a reader in Baltimore:

At my job, we had a parade of experts brought in to give us seminars that would train us to stop micro-aggressions and such. We were taught how to alter our speech and how to and not to engage. We were taught a long history of unrecognized victimization. A lot of it made sense, a lot of it was overreach and a lot of it, ultimately, was destructive in the work space. What happened was, the youngest workers – white or of color – began to refuse to repair problems with their work as instructed. They took the tools given them, in both our culture and from the seminars, and turned them on their managers when they didn’t like what they were hearing. They made their substandard work issues into personal issues, into societal issues. They reported their managers to HR for harassment. The bewildered managers nearly lost their jobs. The bewildered managers were politically progressive. It did not matter.

Finally, a more moderate and maybe more hopeful take from another professor:

I’m a professor at a big state school, and have always considered myself liberal. There’s certainly some of these kind of issues here (depending on the department or school), but it’s not as prevalent as in private schools like Princeton. I see excessively woke politics more among a few of my colleagues than I do among my students

I may be wrong, but my impression is that such divisive on-campus politics are tied somewhat to class. I doubt these issues are as present much at community colleges, where people are struggling to pay for education while taking night classes and maybe working full-time and dealing with childcare.

Regardless, I appreciate Mr. Hoffman’s essay and his balanced perspective, one that accords with my own.

There are a number of people arguing that the author is blaming progressives for making people conservative. I guess there’s some truth to that description as my own headline suggests, but I don’t think Hoffman is saying progressives are responsible for everything the right does and says in perpetuity. He’s not shirking personal responsibility. He’s just pointing out that the culture war on campus creates pushback from a minority of people who don’t like being told what to think about every issue. That strikes me as common sense and would be just as true if the dominant culture on campus was of an aggressive conservative variety and the backlash was from the left.