I’ve written many dark and stormy columns on free speech. Not this one.

For the past 10 years, I’ve watched in dismay as institution after institution abandoned what I had believed were bedrock commitments to free speech, to open inquiry and to institutional neutrality.

Under pressure from mostly left-wing activists — many of them working inside the institutions — universities disinvited speakers and punished professors for wrongthink. Publishers refused to print books whose subjects or authors were deemed offensive. The publisher of the New York Times demanded the resignation of my former boss, a hell of a journalist, for running an op-ed that expressed an opinion shared by more than half the population.