Reflecting on his own campus career as a conservative Catholic dissident, Matthew J. Franck examines the intellectual roots of protests at Yale, Harvard, the University of Missouri, and elsewhere. He locates them in failures of the humanities and social sciences, which have abandoned the quest for truth:

[T]ruth, as an inter-subjective possibility where minds can meet, has been sent packing from the contemporary university, and “commitment” to what is true “for me” has taken its place.

Unlike argument, passionate commitment seeks no interlocutor, no partner in pursuit of knowledge or of the good. It requires the dutiful listener, obsequiously acquiescing in demands, giving way to one after another until the passion is spent and anger mollified—for now. Passionate commitment is willing to shriek obscenities, and thus prides itself on its authenticity. Since it usually gets its way, why shouldn’t it?

The professors and administrators who have lately been flummoxed by student protesters should reflect on the extent to which they are now on the receiving end of lessons they themselves have spent years teaching.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”