The headlines about absurd protests and pseudo-scandals on American campuses, and the often craven responses to them by college administrators, give the sense that academia is imploding. An adumbration of this latest crisis can be found in the end of Lawrence Summers’ tenure as president of Harvard in 2006. Summers found himself in hot water because he transgressed taboos about race and gender and also, writes Edward Alexander, about Israel:

In September 2002, [after Cornel West had accused him of racism, Summers] gave a speech to the Harvard community deploring the upsurge of anti-Semitism in many parts of the globe. He included synagogue bombings, physical assaults on Jews, desecration of Jewish holy places, and denial of the right of “the Jewish state to exist.” But his most immediate concern was that “at Harvard and . . . universities across the country” faculty-initiated petitions were calling “for the university to single out Israel among all nations as the lone country where it is inappropriate for any part of the university’s endowment to be invested.” This brought an avalanche of attacks on Summers from Israel-hating professors throughout this country and also the United Kingdom. . . .

Once Summers had failed the litmus test of contemporary liberalism called “the Palestinian cause,” he was already in great danger. Questioning “gender” doctrine was his third strike, not his second; and calling the BDS movement what it most assuredly is—anti-Semitic—was the only “heresy” he did not recant. . . . Matthew Arnold was prescient when he wrote (about Oxford, England’s Harvard): “there are our young barbarians, all at play.” Summers would eventually find out that in this game, as in others, three strikes and you’re out.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.