Cornell is one of the most segregated institutions in the United States. Many of its black students choose to live in all-black dorms -- a privilege officially denied to most other ethnicities and races at the school. A good many of those black students attend classes at the Africana Studies Center at the north end of campus, where they never have to mix with the general student population. At Africana, they are taught by a faculty infused with the humors of political correctness, anti-white racism and a pseudo-Marxist contempt for American institutions and principles. Here they learn that "only whites can be racist" (because only whites have power) and that slavery in Africa was not really bad (because it wasn't "capitalist" and the slaveholders were black).

The politicization of black studies (and all social disciplines) at Cornell began in 1969 with the most disgraceful occurrence in the history of American higher education. In that year, black radicals armed with shotguns took over the Cornell administration building. From this high ground, they issued a set of demands as a ransom for not carrying their mayhem further. In a denouement that more than any other event may be said to have given birth to the contemporary politicized university, the Cornell administration capitulated to the terrorists' demands. Among these was the surrender of the future education of black students at Cornell to a faculty that met the terrorists' own standards of political correctness.

Since then, the triumph of the political left at Cornell has been challenged only by the pinpricks administered by the Cornell Review and the sporadic appearances of conservative speakers such as Coulter. Unlike for leftists who are invited to speak at Cornell, Coulter's appearance had to be underwritten by outside sources -- in this case (as in most) by the Young America's Foundation in Washington, since the student funds available for such programs at Cornell (as elsewhere) are firmly in the grip of the political left.

Faculty and student conservatives at Cornell -- as at other elite campuses -- are routinely subject to harassment, persecution and an insecurity of place and employment completely unknown to any other minorities, including gays and blacks. Out of more than 1,000 members of the Cornell faculty, for example, there are only three openly conservative professors available to sponsor organizations like the College Republicans and the Cornell Review. (Such sponsorship is a requirement for receiving student funds.) When I spoke at Cornell one of the three faculty conservatives, a botany professor, was under siege by both the administration and the student left -- barred from his own classes and waiting to see if he would be fired -- for expressing a politically incorrect opinion on the issue of homosexuality.

The faculty sponsor of the Cornell Review who introduced Coulter was Jeremy Rabkin, the same conservative professor who had introduced me six years before. At every "liberal" campus in America there tends to be a lonely and courageous intellectual like Rabkin available for this duty. (Harvey Mansfield famously fulfills the function at Harvard.) In the 10 years that I have been visiting college campuses, not a single so-called liberal on the 125 or so with which I am directly familiar has shown the Voltairean spine to actually stand up and defend the conservative students' right to hear speakers of their choice, by offering to sponsor their organizations and events. Either respect for basic democratic principles is so low among the academic elite, or fear of career consequences from the left so great, that this simple act of decency never happens.

In normal circumstances, a conservative coming to speak to the two conservative groups at Cornell would be ignored by the campus media and silently boycotted by the other officially recognized and funded political student organizations, of which there are many -- all of them leftist. Fliers announcing the talk would be torn from campus bulletin boards, leftist professors would advise their students to avoid the occasion, and the event itself would be attended by a small contingent of those willing to be publicly identified as conservatives and to accept the social and educational consequences of that fact.

But this spring -- if my own tour of a dozen campuses is any indication -- it has become almost obligatory for campus radicals to attend these events and attempt to obstruct them in the name of progressive ideas. Since Coulter's topic was the Confederate flag issue, a confrontation of some sort was inevitable. Previously Coulter had written a column on the Confederate battle flag that pointed out that slavery had existed longer under the Stars and Stripes than under the Stars and Bars, that the flag symbolized more than the slavery cause and that in any case there were no visible pro-slavery advocates around to make leftist concerns about the implications of its presence valid.

These mildly expressed views were a call to arms to the Cornell vigilantes. Even before her arrival, campus Democrats had already sent out a flier calling on students to protest Coulter's talk, while another flier from the more ardent left aggressively linked her with Adolf Hitler and David Duke. (The link was a series of anti-affirmative action quotes attributed to each appearing on the same page.)

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