No. There was a chance there to stand for something, for the hard-fought gains of the free speech movement that are now threatened everywhere from Michigan to California, rather than kowtowing.

The newspaper only failed its community when it refused to stand up for itself. Those extremists who would shut down an entire paper rather than be challenged by a single article are just that—extremists.

The newly conjured right to avoid offense is inherently impossible to satisfy. And we shouldn’t try to either. No, mandatory “social justice trainings” won’t prevent you from ever being discomforted, and offering front-page space to people of color is a half-baked idea without any precedent in journalism.

The theory of separate spaces for people of color is predicated on the inaccessibility of traditional spaces to us, an assumption that doesn’t hold in the case of newspapers that, to my knowledge, do not limit applications to whites only. To sequester people of color into a designated section wrongly implies that they could not have been printed otherwise—and I’d rather publish this column under the same banner as my peers than in a separated special box.

On campuses across the country, the mantle of progressivism has been seized by the illiberal and illogical, by people whose philosophies are so shaky that they feel required to shut down and censor voices of dissent. And if that remains the case, if rightly-intended movements continue to be co-opted by Stalinist factions, then those movements will fail.

It’s as simple as that.

Idrees M. Kahloon ’16, a Crimson editorial executive, is an applied mathematics concentrator in Dunster House. His column runs on alternate Tuesdays.