I can’t find the quotation on that horrible online monstrosity called “Facebook” that people like to use, for some reason, so the caveat “if true” applies here, but John Leo reports some disturbing news regarding Providence College and one of its professors, Anthony Esolen:

Support for Esolen by the college president, Father Brian Shanley, has been tepid, of the sort sometimes issued by Catholic administrators embarrassed to be interrupted while converting a Catholic college into a formerly Catholic one. Over the weekend, in a Facebook post, Esolen said of his scheduled speech, “Christ and the Meaning of Cultural Diversity,” that if he tried to give it, he had been told that activist students would shut it down. He said on Facebook: “It is no longer clear to me that Providence College would qualify as ‘worth attending’.”

Colleges must make it clear that students who are incapable of considering ideas to which they object or (worse) unwilling to allow others to do so are not fit for the campus.  Students who disrupt speeches should be expelled, and non-students who do the same should be arrested for trespassing.  Any ostensible institution of higher education that does not take such steps to ensure the free and vigorous exchange of ideas certainly does not qualify as “worth attending.”