Yesterday I talked about student demands and campus commotion over issues ranging from political correctness to microaggressions. You might have wondered what college professors were doing about all of this. You wouldn’t be the only people wondering why the adults on campus have been so silent.

Alan Dershowitz is a former Harvard Law professor. He served in that capacity for fifty years, and had some strong words for what he felt were cowardly professors. He proudly labels himself as a progressive when he has been on my radio program and has been a well-known civil liberties attorney. He might be inclined to agree with some of the student demands but he also is very critical of professors and the administration of these schools.

He says that the “last thing administrators or faculty want to do is get into fights with minority students, because then they’re perceived as being racists and sexists and homophobes, and these are epithets that are hard to respond to. So it’s easier to go with the flow and be popular, particularly with the most vocal students.”

David French is a Harvard Law graduate who has defended student rights on campus. In a recent column he reminds us that the student movements on campus today are “enabled by weakness and empowered by cowardice.” Only the emotionally weak would accept the idea that students are traumatized by dissenting views. And he believes professors are cowards. “Push a professor, even slightly, and it’s likely he’ll fold. Demand faculty support for your protest, and dozens will rush to join.”

He concludes that these are not times that try men’s souls (which is the opening sentence from Thomas Paine’s The American Crisis). Instead, they are times when we have men without chests (which is a reference to a famous C.S. Lewis essay on The Abolition of Man). Obviously it is time for presidents and professors to grow a backbone and stop some of the silliness on campus.