A columnist for the New York Times, Thomas Friedman, was hit in the face with a pie this week while speaking at Brown University. The Brown Daily Herald reports that the assailant was a Brown pupil who helpfully had an accomplice issue flyers denouncing Mr. Friedman for his “sickeningly cheery applaud for free market capitalism’s conquest of the planet.” Mr. Friedman is in quite some company. InsideHigherEd.com reported in April of 2005 that conservative activist David Horowitz was hit with a pie while speaking at Butler University in Indianapolis, and William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, was hit with a pie while speaking at Earlham College in Richmond, Ind.

Well, we hadn’t exactly thought of Mr. Friedman as up there with Adam Smith and Milton Friedman in the ranks of evangelists of free market capitalism, but the newspaperman must have been a target of convenience. It probably says something about the campus left that it has resorted to wasting food rather than trying to answer free-market or conservative views with serious arguments. Meantime, the sane majority of students at Brown and elsewhere can know that it is free market capitalism that has funded the financial aid, the endowed professorships, and the imposing campus buildings that have made American higher education the world’s finest, a ladder of opportunity for Americans of all backgrounds and political beliefs.