So now we have a summit on sexual assault at Dartmouth—one of a series of protests, congressional hearings, “Dear Colleague” letters, and massive regulations designed to help vulnerable women cope with the “toxic” sexual environment on today’s campus.

Undoubtedly, each year some women are cruelly raped on campus and face a bureaucratic or even hostile response from university officials. But they are few in number. It is widely agreed that most rape is “date” or “acquaintance” rape and usually involves a lot of heavy drinking on the woman’s part as well as the man’s. Yet women as victims have become a cause-célèbre.

Forgive me if I think that this is another sign of “it’s all about us.”

Fifty years ago this summer it wasn’t all about us. Hundreds of college students, most of them from the North, went to Mississippi as part of an effort to force segregationists to allow blacks to vote. The Freedom Summer students came mostly from affluent or middle-class families and were there as “bait.” Civil rights leaders had become frustrated at being unable to stanch the violence against blacks in Mississippi. As Politico writer Josh Zeitz points out, they reasoned that the presence of, and violence against, white middle-class college students would attract the kind of attention that local black residents would not.

Whether one approves of that strategy or not (I did, and I was one of the students), it worked—with results even more vicious than the leaders expected. Some of the students had not even arrived in the state when three young men were murdered (two white men from the North, one black man from Mississippi). The leadership had probably expected beatings, not lynchings.

The young men’s murders did shock the country, brought the FBI into the state, awakened the Democratic Party, and ultimately led the Mississippi summer to become a civil rights milestone.

Now, that was violence.