Link back to commentThis is an outstanding and prescient article. Referring to Zola is a most appropriate way to commence this article. Zola like Voltaire and Beaumarchais represented a major commitment to courageous public involvement. By contrast your standard identarian post-modern university activist is a cowardly sycophant, far too cowardly in fact to stand up to the intolerance of forces like out-of-control immigration, potential importation of radical Islam and social dysfunction. In fact the standard humanities faculty at a modern western university, which should be promoting a meaningful universalist view of humanity in the tradition of Voltaire or John Stuart Mill has become an epicenter of gutless conformity and grovelling appeasement of some of society's worst elements.