ASHE SCHOW: Hating Hate Speech.

College students across the country are finding offense in the most inane things — but we already knew that.

Newsweek’s cover story, entitled “The battle against ‘hate speech’ on college campuses gives rise to a generation that hates speech,” takes a look, in great detail, at the state of free speech at today’s universities. It also notes the effects the current “war on free speech” will have for recent graduates.

“Graduates of the Class of 2016 are leaving behind campuses that have become petri dishes of extreme political correctness and heading out into a world without trigger warnings, safe spaces and free speech zones, with no rules forbidding offensive verbal conduct or microaggressions, and where the names of cruel, rapacious capitalists are embossed in brass and granite on buildings across the land,” wrote Nina Burleigh. “Baby seals during the Canadian hunting season may have a better chance of survival.”

Burleigh explains that many are to blame for the current assault on free speech, including students, administrators, feminists and the Education Department. That’s because the Education Department has been cracking down on speech — or “verbal conduct,” as some are now calling it — as a potential violation of the rights of women and minorities. Of course, the speech need not be objectively offensive, it merely needs to offend the most significant among us (or those looking for money or attention) for schools to step in to “protect” someone from words.

If some evil right-wing conspiracy were trying to destroy higher education from within, it couldn’t do a better job.