"There are students and faculty who complain that they don’t want to express centrist or right-wing views because they fear being criticized or stigmatized."

"They may not see themselves as hypersensitive, but they do crave some protection from students and colleagues whom they perceive as demanding leftist ideological conformity. Those who complain of such conformity should recognize that their fear isn’t the fault of anyone’s wokeness or hostility toward free expression. It is a sign that they need more courage — for it requires courage for students, or anyone, to stay engaged with difference. Whatever your political position, embracing intellectual diversity means being brave enough to consider ideas and practices that might challenge your own beliefs or cause you to change your views, or even your life.... In the current climate of political pessimism and manufactured outrage, we can work with students to reject the tired tropes of the past and embrace what many in the older generations have forgotten: how to engage with and, yes, debate people who have a variety of points of view and who imagine the future with a mix of hopes sometimes very different from their own."

From "Anxiety About Wokeness Is Intellectual Weakness" by Michael S. Roth (NYT).  Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, wrote a book called “Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness on College Campuses.”

This is the top-rated comment (from a reader in NYC):

When my daughter was in high school, the teacher and the students of color in her psychology class all agreed that there is no such thing as free will for young black men. That when young black men commit crimes, it is out of the desperation brought on by lack opportunity compounded over generations. My 16 year old daughter argued that individuals always have a choice and the opportunity to exert free will. She was loudly called a racist. The teacher allowed that comment and encouraged discussion of her racism. How much more courageous should she have been? How many more similar stories does this author need to hear before they're no longer dismissed as "anecdotal,["] and instead seen a portrayal of life in "progressive" institutions?

ADDED: Lots of other comments over there — the highest ranking ones all disagreeing with the op-ed. I'll give you a bunch of them:

From Northinsouth (in the Deep South): 

It's not about the debate of ideas nor the brittleness of faculty egos. It's about the genuine fear of professional retaliation and lack of institutional support when it comes to genuine issues of academic freedom and expression. The fact that the president of a university is speaking about professors (of which I am one) and their concerns with such a pie-in-the-sky attitude is borderline offensive. Student dissent is not the professor's enemy. It's lack of institutional support and administrative backbone that is.

From Stuck on a mountain (in New England):

What would happen to a Wesleyan student who stood on a soapbox and said, for example: 

"Biological sex is real." 

"There are average differences, among different populations, in various traits including intelligence." 

"Climate change is not an economic calamity and solutions such as geoengineering and nuclear should be pursued." 

"All lives matter." 

"The Second Amendment was correctly interpreted by the Supreme Court to affirm a personal right to own and keep guns for self defense." 

"MTF transgender athletes should not be allowed to participate in women's sports where their physiology provides unfair advantages." 

"Roe v. Wade and progeny were wrongly decided and the Supreme Court should now affirm there is no federal constitutional right to abortion and leave the issue to state legislatures." 

"There is no systemic racism." 

"The college admission process as well as hiring and advancement in the working world disadvantage straight white males because of what is now reverse discrimination in favor of other groups." 

"Whites are not inherently racist or oppressive." 

"An important reason for the relative underperformance of some minority groups lack of an intact family." 

The list could go on and on. Each of these statements is a perfectly valid topic for discussion and debate. But we all know the answer. 

None of these topics can be discussed openly at Wesleyan or pretty much any other college or university

From Lynne (in New England):

My husband is a dean at an Ivy League university. Woke is so out of control on campus that the term “existential crisis” is being used without hyperbole by faulty leadership. In one week my husband had to deal with students who wanted other students to be “forced” to have half of every STEM lecture devoted to the racism and oppression caused by science. These woke students felt “traumatized” because “native ways of knowing” weren’t being taught in math classes. 

Later that week, woke faculty circulated a petition filled with lies and rumors, decrying a program to foster the free exchange of all viewpoints that Mr. Roth champions. They [were] concerned that conservative viewpoints might be expressed. 

Mr. Roth is right in that campuses need free speech and exchange of all ideas. He is wrong that the woke student (and professor) is a myth. They’re real, and they want to cancel anything other than their increasingly zealous agenda. 

For the record: I’m as liberal as they come, and I’m appalled that anyone at a university is trying to cancel ANY viewpoint.

 From JL (in Boston):

While I agree that the “woke student” is a conveniently manufactured scapegoat, I don’t agree that centrists or right-leaning students and faculty were simply lacking courage when they fear to speak up in liberal institutions. Elite universities have clearly signaled, at least in rhetoric, that it is aligned with a particular way of seeing and talking about equity. 

For example, college diversity and equity statements often lead with racial and gender identities (fair), but pushing social class to the back (elite colleges are packed with upper class kids), eager to call out white privilege but failing to mention educational privileges (which most share at the colleges), hiding concerns for poor whites in terms like “rural” (if included at all), and including Asian students as people of color when needed and omitting them in charts and graphs because their data takes extra effort to explain (because many Asian students share educational and class privileges). 

In this context, do we honestly expect a rural conservative white student to speak up, even if they get admitted to such an elite school? We talk so much about creating safe space for students. I don’t think we have thought intentionally about creating safe space for people who lack both class and educational privileges but are on the inconvenient side of politics. Such echo chamber ultimately hurts our students’ learning and development as communicators for positive social change.

 From M (in Seattle):

I’m not sure if this comment will get published or if anyone will even read it, but here goes. 

I graduated recently from a college which is a left-leaning institution. However, for a few of my classes, I didn’t feel comfortable expressing some of my views, partly because certain professors were very strong in their opinion about the “correct” viewpoint, and when every other student toes the line…well it is difficult to be the only one disagreeing. 

Maybe it is a lack of courage, but it is not easy to be the lone person in a classroom who disagrees. One class in particular was about diversity, equity, etc. (I was required to take). I didn’t like the class because it felt a bit like indoctrination…it claimed all white people are racist, and if you deny this it means it is proof of your racism. 

We had to watch an interview with the White Fragility author. We also had to take an intersectionality test about our levels of privilege. (Yes, from CRT). I wanted to disagree, but felt that if I did I would be labeled a racist or maybe get a bad grade. I should have been more courageous. You are right. 

What I did in the end, when we had to write anonymous reviews of the class, was write a long essay about how I felt we were only taught one viewpoint and how there are many people who disagree, including myself, with many of these new ideas surrounding race or privilege, and that I hoped, in the future, the class would teach alternate viewpoints, and encourage healthy debate.

From sbrian2 (Berkeley, Calif.):

Mr. Roth, I went to Wesleyan, and I'm sitting here dumbfounded at your myopia. How many examples do you need before you admit that higher education has a problem? Did what happened to Nikolas Christakis and his wife at Yale not disturb you? How about the recently cancelled lecture of Dorian Abbot at MIT? Outside academia, political data scientist David Shor lost his job for merely tweeting a summary of a report that concluded that violent civil rights protests end in a backlash against civil rights—no joke. Nothing to see here? 

There are countless other similar examples, from both public and private universities and schools—and, increasingly, corporations—from across the country. 

Wesleyan still hasn't signed the Chicago Statement, even after students attacked the student newspaper for publishing a (mild!) critique of the BLM movement. I'd call that a lack of courage.