The campus Left has become known for its eagerness to declare itself offended by a speech, a video, a statute, a phrase, a name — almost anything that bothers one of our Social Justice Warriors. Used to dealing calmly and rationally with controversy, conservatives are generally slow to take offense, if they do so at all — even when faced with nasty and often personal attacks.

But as Martin Center intern Frank Pray reminds us in this article, sometimes conservatives have been too quick to complain about people and courses.

He writes specifically about a course taught at UNC–Chapel Hill in 2015 entitled “Literature of 9/11.”

“On paper, this class seemed troubling,” Pray writes. “It covered a variety of readings that appeared to give only the perspectives of terrorists, terrorist sympathizers, comics criticizing the nationalist fervor following the attacks, and critics of the Iraq invasion.” The course was slammed by conservatives. Some demanded its cancellation; some wanted the professor, Neel Ahuja, fired.

The course went on and Ahuja subsequently left for UC–Santa Cruz. But that isn’t quite the end of the story. Pray did some digging into the class and found that he’d been hasty in his judgment:

I’ve spoken to students who took the class. I’ve studied its assigned readings. The picture painted after an in-depth look at the course is different from the one painted after reading only its short description. The material was in my view one-sided, but the instruction and discussion weren’t.

While there are plenty of “progressive” professors who like nothing better than to use their classrooms as pulpits for preaching their gospel, we shouldn’t assume that everyone who offers a course that seems to be slanted is one of them.

Those of us on the right need to act like the adults in the room and not succumb to the temptation to blow up at the slightest provocation. Leave the tantrums to the “liberals.”

I like Pray’s conclusion:

In this era of ‘outrage culture’ and hostility to free speech, we should take it upon ourselves to create an intellectual environment ripe for the pursuit of knowledge and truth, wherever that may lead. In terms of higher education, that means emphasis should be on putting bad or ill-conceived ideas in front of the firing squad, not professors’ jobs and academic freedom.