In 2014, a professor of English named Steven Salaita had a job offer rescinded after a series of anti-Semitic tweets attracted public attention. (They included: “At this point, if Netanyahu appeared on TV with a necklace made from the teeth of Palestinian children, would anybody be surprised?” and “Zionists: transforming ‘anti-Semitism’ from something horrible into something honorable since 1948.”) Since then, Salaita has held a series of temporary posts, but apparently no one will offer him a tenured or tenure-track appointment, and so he has decided to leave academia.

This means, Jonathan Marks writes, that we

will now be endlessly subjected to the claim that Salaita cannot find a job merely because, as he puts it, he has “disdain for [Zionist] settler colonialism.” The problem is, he says, that academia is a “bourgeois industry that reward self-importance and conformity.”

That is nonsense.

First, Steven Salaita’s position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—roughly, that Zionism is the problem and that turning Israel into a pariah state is a prudent and moral way of dealing with it—may be foolish and morally obtuse. But it is hardly out of bounds in academia, and well over a thousand academics have expressed public support for the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. Many of them occupy tenured positions at prestigious colleges and universities and, at least as far as I can tell, pay no professional cost for holding the very same set of views Salaita wants us to think are too hot for academia to handle.

Second, in the field Salaita inhabits, a pro-BDS position is not a nonconformist position. It is famously the official line of the American Studies Association (ASA). The Association for Asian American Studies, which preceded the ASA in passing a boycott resolution, passed the resolution unanimously with nary an extension. Over four years ago, I observed that not one scholar in that field had publicly dissented. As far as I know, that remains the case today. Salaita himself, in spite of a thin scholarly record, was offered a job at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the flagship of the Illinois system, presumably on the strength of his activism. There is no doubt in my mind that were it not for his disgusting tweets, he would be happily tenured at U of I spouting the same line he was spouting before he got into trouble. . . .

[In sum,] Salaita’s views are not what undid him. He was undone by his own callousness and recklessness, neither of which has he found any reason to regret.

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.