Editor’s Note: The following column by Clarence Page appeared in the Sunday Chicago Tribune and is reprinted with permission of Tribune Media Services. Page, a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, will appear on campus Friday to receive NIU Journalism Department’s Illinois Journalist of the Year Award.

“I always read your column,” a woman said recently, “although I don’t always agree with you.”

So what? Where do people get the notion that they’re supposed to agree with everything they read? Are they afraid of being offended? Don’t they know the right to offend is a precious American right?

I try to exercise it often. Judging by some of my mail, I’m getting pretty good at it. Unfortunately, the fine art of offense has fallen on hard times, squeezed by the recklessness of too many amateurs on one side and a rising wave of sensitivity on the other.

Nowhere is this more true than on college campuses, which are becoming, in the noble name of tolerance, a mite less tolerant.

At the University of Michigan, for example, a student was charged with violating the school’s language code when he suggested in class that homosexuality might be a disease.

At the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, a student was put on probation and had to do community service work at a shelter for battered women because he yelled vulgarities at a woman who criticized the athletic department.

At the University of California at Berkeley, a professor was drowned out by protesting students after he suggested that white and Asian students suffered under affirmative-action programs.

I don’t agree with any of these speakers, but those who overreact to the content of their views risk slipping and sliding down to their level of ignorance.

It is informative to note that the Michigan student who ran afoul of a rule intended to protect minorities happened to be black. So was another Michigan student who was punished under the same rules for using the expletive “white trash.” It’s hardly the first time a censor’s rules whipped back snakelike to bite those it was intended to protect.

Then there are those who argue that women and minorities should be exempt from such rules because they do not belong to an “oppressor class.” As a member of a minority group, African-Americans, I take exception to that. To take away from me the ability ever to become an “oppressor” is to imply that I can never aspire to the obligations, along with the right, that full humanity entails.

All this in the name of “sensitivity” to the feelings of women, minorities and the “differently abled,” which in some circles is the “politically correct” way to refer to the disabled. Count me as one minority group member who says “thanks, but no thanks” to sensitivity that stifles the free discourse universities are supposed to encourage.

After all, one person’s rational view is another person’s claptrap. The American people are not perfect. Along with some of the world’s greatest art and ideas, we also produced atonal music, 2 Live Crew and David Duke. But the nation has grown strong by letting the claptrap express itself, then fall of its own dead weight.

“Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too,” Voltaire advised. Unfortunately, too many of today’s great campus thinkers, Voltaire is just another DWEM, dead white European male, a product of a Western civilization that historically suppressed the rights of minorities and therefore should be replaced in the campus’ corps curriculum with female and Third World authors.

No question that women and non-Europeans have been squeezed out of university studies for too long. Unfortunately, some proponents have gone to the other extreme, freezing out ideas they don’t like as certainly as their own were squeezed out in the past.

Conservative Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.), in an unusual alliance with the American Civil Liberties Union, has taken a modest stab at stemming the tide. His proposed Collegiate Speech Protection Act would extend 1st Amendment rights now enjoyed by students at public colleges and universities to the students of private colleges and universities.

Unfortunately, Hyde proposes to remedy objectionable rules by urging Congress to pass what looks like yet another objectionable rule. Under the guise of expanding the rights of students, his bill would constrain the right of private universities to set their own rules, including rules that call for civilized behavior, free of congressional meddling.

Hyde, a conservative who usually advocates removing government from the people’s backs, apparently recognized the hidden dangers of putting more government on college administrators’ backs when he included in his bill an exemption for educational institutions “controlled by a religious organization” if application of the proposed law “would not be consistent with the religious tenets of such organization.”

One wonders what will happen when, under Hyde’s rule, a student heretic demands his or her rights too, even though they disagree with those of the religious organization that controls the college. Yes, whether it’s a matter of “political correctness” or “theological correctness,” Congress has no business telling colleges where to put their limits on either one.

No offense.