Last September, Harvey wrote in The Free For All about Star Simpson -- the MIT student who was arrested at Logan Airport for wearing a (prank) sweatshirt displaying a working circuit board connected to a battery -- and predicted that "there is no way prosecutors can convince twelve sane jurors that a student, wearing such a sweatshirt with the flashing lights tacked onto the outside rather than hidden underneath her clothing, was actually trying to perpetrate a hoax that she was a suicide bomber."

Every few weeks a story pops up about how someone – often a college student or an employee who has been fed propaganda to the effect that he or she is entitled to live an offense-free life – was “harassed” because someone else left nasty comments on their door dry-erase board, or some such thing. The most recent example comes from the University of North Dakota, where one student was just charged with misdemeanor disorderly conduct for smearing ice cream on the wall of the dorm elevator to write the words “Scott is a Jew.

Just when you think you’ve heard the last politically correct, holier-than-thou pronouncement coming out of our university campuses for a while, you open the morning’s newspaper and find more inanities. This morning’s two-minutes-outrage is a rant from campus professors, researchers and administrators criticizing Big Tobacco for giving – and universities for accepting – no-strings-attached grants for health-related research at Boston University, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of technology, and the University of Massachusetts.