The world was stunned — and I was left numb — when author Salman Rushdie was attacked and nearly killed as he prepared to speak to an audience in the Amphitheater at New York’s renowned Chautauqua Institution.

Fortunately, he survived. But I was repulsed anew when I read a column recently in the Wall Street Journal attacking Chautauqua for bringing in too many left-wing speakers. Besides being unfair, it was in poor taste. In America, you have the right to expect everyone to condemn attempted murder, regardless of the politics of the person attacked.

Chautauqua has been a non-partisan, non-profit place devoted to culture, faith and learning since the 1870s; I’ve been going to its programs since I was a young boy in the first years after World War II.

That columnist’s reaction made me, a man who grew up a Republican, ask: What’s wrong with conservatives today?

For many years I taught chemistry at Bowling Green State University, a place in Ohio that began as a college to educate teachers in the 1920’s, and is surrounded by a district that has been nirvana for conservative Republicans.

Currently, it is represented in Congress by Bob Latta, who has been there since 2007; before that, his father, the late Del Latta, held the seat from 1959 to 1989. Though the new post-census boundaries are still being determined, the district is certain to be, as always, reliably Republican. Donald Trump carried it by an overwhelming 23 percent margin both times he ran.

The younger Latta climbed the political ladder in the usual way, first narrowly losing a GOP primary to succeed his dad. After that, he first got elected to the Wood County commission and then served stints in both the Ohio House and Senate. When the man who beat him in the 1988 congressional primary fell down his stairs and died, Bob Latta finally made it to the House.

His legislative record has not been notable, but his constituents seem content to reelect him by wide margins.

He’s also an alum of BGSU … which reminds me of a story about one of America’s most famous conservatives and that school. Now, small state universities like, occasionally, to show graduates that they are connected to the outside world — at least enough to lure a celebrity commencement speaker, who will come if the price is right.

So it was that on a spring day, a speaker who had been indeed been paid nicely for his services (and had gotten an honorary degree to boot) came to bless the BGSU graduates of 1989.

In this case, the hired gun speaker was no hated liberal, but none other than William F. Buckley Jr., who was introduced to a smattering of polite applause. I don’t recall either of the Lattas being there that day. But Fred Rogers was. The students had invited him, or more precisely, the faculty at the students’ request had nominated that star of children’s television to get an honorary degree as well.

When he was introduced the students spontaneously burst into a song from his show, Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, and when he heard it he led them in song as he likely had years before when they were toddlers.

Buckley, a highly imposing figure, was unhappy his thunder was being stolen. He leaned close to then- President Paul Olscamp and asked, “Who is that man?” Yet Buckley had no use for crazies like the John Birch Society, and would not, I’m sure, have supported Donald Trump. So it was deep surprise when I heard a conservative speaker at Chautauqua recently, Jonah Greenberg, doff his cap to his late mentor Buckley as he went on to explain why he left Fox News.

Greenberg’s syndicated column appears regularly in the Chicago Tribune, and scores of other papers. His first book, Liberal Fascism, was a top New York Times and Amazon bestseller.

The genteel, former managing editor of Time, Nancy Gibbs, led Greenberg through an excellent description of politics today from a conservative’s perspective. He indicated, as other eloquent Chautauqua speakers have, that America is existentially threatened by a man who wants to destroy democracy, aided by a few devils in sheep’s clothing.

Chautauqua is in my DNA. My mother worked there in the 1930s; my dad went to summer school in the 1920s and my grandfather shared parts of an ox roasted on the Amphitheater floor in 1910.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul rightly said after the Aug. 12 attack on Mr. Rushdie “this place doesn’t just value dialogue and freedom of speech and thought, it exists because of those values.”

Few presidents have been as reviled as Franklin Delano Roosevelt. On August 14, 1936, at almost the same spot on the amphitheater stage where Rushdie was attacked, FDR proclaimed “I hate war.”

There have been many others from Henry Ford and Thomas Edison who hated war too. But sometimes, war is inevitable, and seated directly behind Roosevelt on that day was then-treasury department lawyer Robert H. Jackson. In 1940, after that war had begun, it would be his job to justify America’s lending ships to Great Britain to help the King’s navy defend that island, something that may have saved western civilization.

So when a columnist claimed all points of view aren’t represented at Chautauqua, the falsity made my blood boil. Chautauqua, by the way, is a private institution. It has every right to be as biased as it wants – but it isn’t.

In today’s troubled world, when it often seems like the barbarians are within the gates, the Chautauqua Institution is more needed than ever.

Douglas Neckers is an organic chemist, the McMaster distinguished professor emeritus and the founder of the Center for Photochemical Sciences at Bowling Green State University and also a former board chair of the Robert H. Jackson Center in Jamestown, N.Y.