Recently, the student newspaper at an elite northeastern university analyzed the list of outside speakers invited to campus in order to assess where they stood politically. Two years in a row, it found that 93% of the speakers were on the left, and only 7% on the right.

Students in one class staunchly defended these percentages. One said students were "entitled" to "set an acceptable moral code" for their campus. Another argued that students who wanted to hear conservative speakers remained free to watch them on YouTube. A third argued that limitations on conservative speakers on campus were necessary to ensure that students whose heartfelt positions on important issues conservative speakers would invariably criticize were afforded "safe spaces."

As for "safe spaces" for conservative students, or ones simply interested in hearing conservative viewpoints and asking questions, they were out of luck.

For too long, and far too egregiously, students who do not adhere to all of the required tenets of progressive orthodoxy on predominantly left-leaning campuses have been left to feel belittled, derided, ostracized — and intimidated — by fellow students and in some cases faculty. Put simply, they have been put in fear of expressing their opinions, or even asking questions about others' opinions.

Small wonder, therefore, that an unapologetically conservative, often provocative and even sometimes taunting voice like that of Charlie Kirk was received not merely with enthusiasm but gratitude by immense numbers of young Americans. It has doubtless been comforting, even thrilling, for many to see Kirk go fearlessly head to head with his contemporaries on the left, into the proverbial lions' den, frequently leaving the lions he confronted looking flummoxed and discombobulated.

Within hours of Kirk's sickening assassination by the latest hate-fueled American lunatic, the Foundation for Individual Rights released its 2025 College Free Speech Rankings, showing that one in three American college students believe it can be perfectly fine to use violence to prevent a speaker from speaking. That's a nearly 80% increase since 2020.

No intelligent person needs to have the danger this poses for the future of our country explained to them. The danger is profound. And it's manifest both on the left and the right.

Ari Fleischer, former President George W. Bush's press secretary and a Republican commentator, had one worthy recommendation. "In memory of Charlie," Fleischer posted, "I urge every major American university, especially the Ivy League and New England's small liberal arts colleges, to invite conservative speakers to their campuses and to welcome them. Academia cannot be a no go zone for conservatives." By the very same token, smaller colleges in southern, midwestern and rural states should make a policy of inviting progressive speakers and welcoming them. This is a small but concrete step in the direction of rolling back the demonization of the political Other that is tearing America to pieces, and to restoring some of the civility that has hemorrhaged out of American society.

More broadly, an honest reckoning about responsibility for our current state of affairs is urgently, even desperately, needed, and it will require many on both sides to look inward. The right points to assassination attempts against Donald Trump and a plot against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh as evidence of guilt on the left. The celebration of the slaughter of Israelis on Oct. 7, the defense by groups like the Democratic Socialists of America of genocidal attacks against Israelis dancing at a music festival, the ripping down of posters of innocents kidnapped and held hostage in Gazan tunnels are all evidence of the moral depravity on the left that the right claims it is.

But there can be no honest reckoning about the vitriol and the indulgence of political violence in this country without the right finally confronting the painfully obvious: Donald Trump's abominable promotion of it. The gleeful, relentless posts glorifying violence against political opponents, the mocking of the murderous assault on Nancy Pelosi's husband, the praise for domestic extremists, the incitement of a riot at the Capitol and the pardon of those who brutally assaulted police officers there, the constant calls for "retribution" against adversaries — all this and much more is significantly responsible for where we find ourselves.

Honest reckonings are two-way streets. It's long past time for the finger-pointers to point the fingers at themselves.

Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.

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