In the Wall Street Journal, David Horowitz makes a telling observation about the state of free speech on campus. Horowitz discusses a recent speech he delivered at the University of Texas, and describes being questioned afterwards by a Professor Dana Cloud:

She presented herself as a devoted teacher and mother who was obviously harmless. Then she accused me of being a McCarthyite menace. Disregarding the facts I had laid out in my talk — that I have publicly defended the right of University of Colorado’s radical professor Ward Churchill to hold reprehensible views and not be fired for them, and that I supported the leftist dean of the law school at UC Irvine when his appointment was withdrawn for political reasons — she accused me of whipping up a “witch-hunting hysteria” that made her and her faculty comrades feel threatened.

When Ms. Cloud finished, I pointed out that organizing mobs to scream epithets at invited speakers fit the category of “McCarthyite” a lot more snugly than my support for a pluralism of views in university classrooms. I gestured toward the armed officers in the room — the university had assigned six or seven to keep the peace — and introduced my own bodyguard, who regularly accompanies other conservative speakers when they visit universities. In the past, I felt uncomfortable about taking protection to a college campus until a series of physical attacks at universities persuaded me that such precautions were necessary. (When I spoke at the University of Texas two years ago, Ms. Cloud and her disciples had to be removed by the police in order for the talk to proceed.)

I don’t know of a single leftist speaker among the thousands who visit campuses every term who has been obstructed or attacked by conservative students, who are too decent and too tolerant to do that. The entire evening in Texas reminded me of the late Orianna Fallaci’s observation that what we are facing in the post-9/11 world is not a “clash of civilizations,” but a clash of civilization versus barbarism.