Current Princeton undergraduate Alexandra Orbuch shared footage on social media of an event on campus that featured former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. Predictably, activists tried to prevent him from speaking. During the event, someone pulled the fire alarm, and about 20 protesters walked out while chanting “you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,” and campus police officers stood by as one man (who didn’t have a university affiliation) yelled from the audience for about two minutes. The student newspaper, the Daily Princetonian, reported that about 200 protesters “chanted, screamed and banged on drums,” which could be heard from inside the lecture hall during Naftali’s talk. In response to Orbuch’s social-media post, activists celebrated the disruptions: 1) “ur crying makes me happy,” 2) “Good. More of this. No genocide enablers need speak,” 3) “would have been cooler if they just ran up and killed him with their bare hands,” and 4) “he’s lucky someone didn’t put a bullet in his head.”

This incident should remind us that admirable free-expression policies alone do not cultivate a campus culture where free speech thrives. Princeton University adopted expansive free-expression protections in 2015, but those must be enforced — and they evidently aren’t, given that campus officers permitted a man to interrupt for about two minutes. Moreover, this debacle illustrates that the climate at higher-education institutions across the country is so abysmal that even the comparatively better schools are still really bad. The most recent free-speech rankings developed by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) state that Princeton is seventh in “tolerance for speakers,” 29th in “admin support,” and 129th in “disruptive conduct” out of 251 campuses. Don’t forget that Princeton University has been U.S. News’s top-ranked university in the United States for years. Everything is rotten — to the core and to the top.