Tuesday’s front-page New York Times headline sounded concerning: “Voice on Right Pioneers Siege On Campuses.” A multi-pronged “siege” of college campuses?

The online headline unpacked the point but kept the hostile tone: “A Tiny Conservative News Outlet Pioneered the Attack on Higher Education -- Campus Reform was founded years ago to expose what it calls leftist bias on college campuses. The online site’s cause has gone from fringe to mainstream.”

Higher education reporter Vimal Patel tends to give the campus left the benefit of the doubt in any ideological confrontation, and on Tuesday he painted Campus Reform as irresponsible and possibly dangerous, while citing a well-known radical academic refugee as a warning voice.

Around the height of the pro-Palestinian campus protests last year, a conservative journalist sent an email to the federal government complaining about Princeton University.

“Jewish students have felt increasingly unwelcome and unsafe at Princeton,” the journalist, Zachary Marschall, wrote. He cited a series of news reports about pro-Palestinian activism on campus, including a student group demanding “the full dismantling of the Zionist apartheid state.” He wanted a full investigation.

If Patel had been interested in the awful details behind the bland statement “pro-Palestinian activism on campus,” the Times itself recently laid some out the anti-Jewish thuggery committed at UCLA.

Patel seemed miffed at how easy it was for a conservative to make himself heard.

Dr. Marschall was not a student himself. In fact, he had never set foot on the Princeton campus. Nevertheless, the complaint resulted in a federal investigation.

....

His group, though small, was an early architect of the internet-era conservative attack on higher education. In recent years, the group’s alarmed view of American college campuses has moved from the fringes into the mainstream.

Patel admitted Campus Reform's efforts were bearing fruit, with the Trump administration "trying to stamp out diversity and equity programming, through threat of federal force."

Campus Reform’s critics argue its bleak view of colleges is an invention stitched together with anecdotes, often out of context, sometimes broadcast by mainstream media. They say it is an unfair and inaccurate view of life on campuses and note that its tactics, which often single out and name individuals, can lead people to become targets of harassment and abuse.

If Marschall were a liberal activist, wouldn’t Patel be praising the fact that anyone can file a civil rights complaint as an example everyone having access to justice?

His effort has highlighted that anyone can lodge complaints that lead to a civil rights investigation, a process the Trump administration is now using in its attacks on schools. The strategy’s success has also been something of a shock, even to Dr. Marschall.

Patel found the left's favorite anti-Trump academic hysteric American escapee, professor Jason Stanley, who just can’t stop comparing people he disagrees with to Adolf Hitler.

Campus Reform is an “anti-intellectual hammer” that has struck fear in faculty members, said Jason Stanley, a philosophy professor who has been the subject of many Campus Reform articles....

In 2016, Dr. Stanley found himself at the center of a conservative media firestorm for the first time, including a Campus Reform article. He had used profanity on social media to condemn a philosophy professor who said being gay was a disability, leading to a backlash.

Dr. Stanley said it was a devastating experience. He couldn’t grade papers, spent three weeks in bed and felt abandoned by colleagues. His office phone rang off the hook, and someone sent pornography to his home depicting someone being raped.

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The American Association of University Professors, an academic freedom group, surveyed more than 300 people who were the subject of Campus Reform articles written in 2020, and heard back from over 200. More than 40 percent said they had received threats of physical violence.

The AAUP is hardly an objective source; it's.led by a raging leftist radical professor. 

Patel let Stanley offer his familiar, twisted take that fighting anti-Semitism on campus is abusive, then noted he was moving to Canada, blaming "the ugliness of the American political environment and the Trump administration’s attack on higher education."