Writing on Bloomberg View, the always sharp Megan McArdle, who never gets taken in by progressive/statist nonsense, contributes to the debate over the way Marquette is handling the McAdams affair.

She observes that each of the players in this little drama can be faulted: the student who “comes off as abrasive and arrogant and obsessed with a tangential point that tripped his personal ideological radar,” the TA (Cheryl Abbate), who “seems not to understand what the free exchange of ideas is for, or why a university might be a good place to have one,” and Professor McAdams, who “went blazing away without asking Abbate for her side of the story, speaking to the departmental chair or otherwise checking into what he was writing.”

McAdams, she argues, probably should have gotten a talking-to for his reaction (in a blog post), but instead the university went ballistic, immediately suspending him and barring him from campus as if he was spreading the bubonic plague, and then deciding to fire him, tenure be damned. McArdle’s assessment is devastating: “It is trying to fire McAdams precisely because he exercised his academic and personal freedoms of thought, discourse, advocacy and action. I may not entirely approve of the way he exercised them, but that’s beside the point — no, actually it is exactly the point. We don’t need protections for speech that everyone approves of.”

Precisely. Our universities used to be places where contentious and sometimes overheated arguments could be carried out. Now, with thin-skinned people ready to cry out against anyone who offends them and administrators who feel the need to side with anyone who has a claim to oppressed victim status, we’re losing that.

Will there be long-run consequences? Probably so. This incident will certainly strengthen the perception that Marquette has so completely fallen under the sway of politically correct forces that it will lose support from donors and non-leftist families who won’t even put it down as a backup school. “Marquette should respect McAdams’ rights because it’s the right thing to do. But failing that, they should respect his rights because it’s the best way to protect their own,” she concludes.