GEORGE WILL: The modern US campus shouldn’t be a safe space.

A specter is haunting academia, the specter of specters — ghosts, goblins and “cultural appropriation” through insensitive Halloween costumes. Institutions of higher education are engaged in the low comedy of avoiding the agonies of Yale.

Last October, the university was rocked to its 315-year-old foundations by the wife of a residential college master.

In response to a university memorandum urging students to wear culturally sensitive costumes — e.g., no sombreros — she wrote an e-mail saying it should be permissible for young people to be inappropriate, provocative or even offensive because “the ability to tolerate offense” is a hallmark of “a free and open society.”

After the dust settled from this, she and her husband left the residential college. And Yale had trampled in the dust the noble legacy of its 1975 Woodward Report.

Named for the chairman of the committee that produced it, historian C. Vann Woodward, the report was written after Yale’s awkward handling of some controversial speakers. Reaffirming freedom of expression’s “superior importance to other laudable principles and values,” the report said:

“Without sacrificing its central purpose, [a university] cannot make its primary and dominant value the fostering of friendship, solidarity, harmony, civility or mutual respect. . . . It will never let these values, important as they are, override its central purpose.”

That purpose, as Hanna Holborn Gray, a former president of the University of Chicago, once said, is not to make young adults comfortable, it is to make them think. Since 1975, however, universities have embraced the doctrine that speech that offends people actually harms them, mentally and even physically.

Sad.