Protest is American, solidly at the heart of any democratic society. Many of our cherished institutions have a long history of protest. But the protests on college campuses today are not what they seem.
Mid-February in Portland, Oregon, a panel on diversity was disrupted by protesters when the biologist — that would be me — made the outrageous claim that, anatomically and physiologically speaking, men and women are different.
That is a factually accurate description of what happened, but it is misleading, and obscures the most troubling part of the story.
A two-minute clip of the disruption has been widely circulated, and is excerpted from the hour and a half video of the entire event, below, which has considerably more nuance. Andy Ngo, the graduate student organizer, wrote about the run-up to the panel in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago, in which he noted that violence had been threatened; as a result of that threat, there was considerable police and other protective presence on site.
