The protesters at Middlebury College, who shouted down conservative Professor Charles Murray Thursday night, brought shame to the college and discredited their purported support of racial and sexual equality.

That violent opponents were permitted to disrupt an invited speaker and injure a faculty member is outrageous.

Yet all too often as university administrators cower before the misguided, misinformed, undisciplined, uncivil rabble that increasingly is permitted to enroll in America colleges.

The latter spoil campuses with their pseudo-intellectual detritus—unexposed to alternative perspectives that might actually be educational.

They are a spoiled, enabled generation with no sincere beliefs rooted in genuine grievances. Their sole aim is to shout down others to whom they deny the very right they claim as their exclusive domain. Their claim to support the disenfranchised is bogus because they refuse to extend the same recognition to alternative opinions.

They never have heard of civil disobedience. That’s CIVIL disobedience. The respectful protest that draws attention to a cause but does not disrupt nor interfere with the equal opportunity of others to express different views.

University administrators, many the product of the liberal anti-government protests of the 1960s, shamelessly permit such animal behavior.

They are too timid to confront the mobs. They lack the moral fiber to expel the unruly. They hide behind weak claims that such protests do not reflect the intellectual values of the institution.

Then they shrink back to the protective cocoons of their administrative offices—hoping that all this noise will simply go away and the school can continue to college the expensive tuition moneys from the inmates.

I expect Middlebury to take no more action than its tepid apology. There will be no punishment of the students, no expulsions, and no policies implemented that clearly demand civil behavior.

And the totalitarian mentality of the left will rule. As it does on too many university campuses these days where freedom of expression has been denied and the First Amendment has been trampled.

Absolutely disgraceful!