Controversial speakers. Provocative viewpoints. Cheers and jeers. It’s good to see that college hasn’t changed much over the decades.

Events such as the anti-affirmative action bake sale and the Ward Churchill speech on the campus of Eastern Washington University have a lineage that stretches back decades in the United States. College campuses nurtured the rise of the counterculture, which reached a violent apex during the Vietnam War.

Rather than wring our hands about extreme viewpoints and half-baked demonstrations, we should be grateful that the era of bombings, tear gas and building takeovers is behind us.

It’s against that historic backdrop that the twin melodramas over Churchill and the bake sale look so overwrought.

Despite having his official visit canceled over security concerns, Churchill appeared on campus recently and delivered a speech to about 500 people. He said he stood behind a post-Sept. 11 essay that triggered some death threats. In the essay, he called some of the people who died in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center “little Eichmanns,” because they helped foster an oppressive U.S. foreign policy that harmed innocent people abroad. Adolf Eichmann carried out the Nazi plan to exterminate Europe’s Jews.

Churchill isn’t the brightest thinker when it comes to foreign policy, and his Eichmann analogy is particularly dim, but that’s not the point.

Provocative viewpoints are a staple of college campuses. Students can agree, disagree or ignore them. In the end, nobody is physically harmed.

The anti-affirmative action bake sale left out some key ingredients to the issue, but the opposition readily supplied them. That’s the way it should be, yet some people wanted the event to be canceled for fear that it would cause anger and discomfort. Universities should be free-fire zones when it comes to exchanging ideas. It is antithetical to their missions to stop controversial events because some students and faculty members want to be protected from unfriendly thoughts.

On Thursday, the bake sale was held. There were sharp exchanges, hurt feelings and moments of tension, but nothing that would’ve warranted shutting it down.

Next Thursday, famed MIT linguist Noam Chomsky will give a speech at Gonzaga University.

Over the years, he has written blistering critiques of U.S. foreign policy, including the Iraq war. He’s said every president from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to George W. Bush has been guilty of war crimes.

That’s probably not a view many Americans share, but it doesn’t hurt to listen.