Journalist Thomas Friedman, hardly a champion of free-market capitalism, got a pie in his face this week while speaking at Brown University. The pie-slinging student scored Friedman for his “sickeningly cheery applaud [sic] for free market capitalism’s conquest of the planet.”

This is the latest in a string of cartoonish pie “attacks” on real (or perceived) conservatives or free-market advocates on campuses. Both David Horowitz and William Kristol have received the same treatment.

The New York Sun takes a rather sunny view of these pie protests, opining that

the sane majority of students at Brown and elsewhere can know that it is free market capitalism that has funded the financial aid, the endowed professorships, and the imposing campus buildings that have made American higher education the world’s finest, a ladder of opportunity for Americans of all backgrounds and political beliefs.

Here’s hoping that the majority of students are so sensible. If so, it’s not because many of their professors have made the case made for free markets.