From Harvard Law Prof Jill Lepore:
I am in the belly of that beast. I’ve been teaching at Harvard since 2003, and something really changed on campus around 2014. I often talk with colleagues who are close friends about this: What was it that actually changed it?
Students started showing up, determined that their job in a classroom was to humiliate one another and possibly catch a professor in saying something that was a violation of what they believed to be a way you can speak, or a thing you can say about something. This entire campus became incredibly prosecutorial to the public shaming stuff. I just think it’s silly to deny that that existed, that it didn’t harm a lot of people, that it wasn’t wildly out of control on many occasions.
Do I still deeply believe in the mission of higher education and that this is an institution whose value to the world in terms of its research and scholarship and the ambitions of education that it stands on? I think those are crucially important. But I think it just surprises me to no end when people are like: Well, there was really never a problem on campuses. I don’t know what college campus they’re talking about. . . . I just think the left has to admit that it has done a lot to make a lot of Americans feel like they do not belong.

