There is only one issue here. It’s whether a private university should have different standards for free speech than the public polity. Hate speech is permitted under the First Amendment. There are limits, but those go to incitement, not sentiment. A public figure with no legal authority to censor is neither tolerating nor permitting the offending speech. The constitution permits such speech because voters have a need to know that some of their fellow citizens are awful enough to use it. Rawls’s view is that the Harvard administration, by its constitution as a “democracy in small,” should behave as if it, too, had no power to censor. In that judgement, one can disagree.

If we decide that different rules apply inside a university, because students are not electors, and they do not have an essential need to know that a fellow student feels strongly enough about race to post offensive matter for public view, we leave Prof. Rawls’s “jurisdiction” as a philosopher of public policy. (Perhaps that’s why he said he had no useful opinion to offer, i.e., not professional opinion as a philosopher of public policy. After that, he was just a guy thinking about whether thicker skin or safer space is the solution to hate speech on campus. I think reasonable people can disagree about that.

Mr. Cruz makes a case for censoring hate speech, but citing those claiming to be injured, he removes any possibility that the distinction between racially “discriminatory” speech and “hate speech” will survive as a practical matter. Everything upsets someone, and some people — mirror images, so to speak, of Ms. Kerrigan — seek notoriety through grievance. That a polemicist could find outliers who say their educations were adversely affected by a confederate flag is not surprising. But in the specific context of Harvard, the poster of the flag was an outlier, too, not a leader testing the waters. (If that assessment is wrong, then subsequent acts of hate speech would have occurred and could then have been dealt with as obviously injuring their targets.)

Meanwhile, this article puts another nail in the coffin of “racism” as a meaningful accusation. If John Rawls is a racist, very few white people are going to fee offended by the label. Yeah, he’s privileged. But being privileged is not the same thing as being racist, unless one dumbs “racist” down to mean “privileged and not doing penance.” Victims of enslavement, lynching, and genocidal extermination may wish the term to have more bite. In my view, Mr. Cruz does such people a disservice. By diluting the definition of racism, he does not, as he may think, make the mundane heinous; rather, he makes the heinous mundane.