Considering the current degraded state of American higher education, Yuval Levin looks back at the campus upheavals of the 1970s, when “the people running the university were gradually choosing to cooperate with the people who wanted to burn it down.” Yet while the revolutionaries who took over the institutions in the last quarter of the 20th century saw themselves as pioneers of free speech, the universities became increasingly censorious and intolerant—so much so that many conservative critics have come to see freedom of speech as the solution to these ills. But that’s not quite right, argues Levin:

The university cannot be understood as just another platform for saying anything you want. We have a lot of those now. What we don’t have enough of are venues for engaging in teaching and learning in pursuit of knowledge of the truth. . . . The inadequacy of free-speech arguments alone has come into clearer focus over the past year, as it has become increasingly evident that we are in a new phase of the campus crisis. This phase had an unusually distinct starting point: it began on October 7, 2023.

Hamas’s savage attack against Israel unleashed an explosion of anti-Semitic hatred on many elite American campuses, and the response from most university administrators was at best a tenuous, anemic reticence. Campus leaders suddenly rediscovered their relativism—anti-Semitism depends on the context, you may recall the president of Harvard saying. This was matched by a newfound zeal for free speech. After years of enforcing dogmatic restrictions and requirements, presidents of universities suddenly found themselves telling members of Congress that it wouldn’t be right to censure even open calls for genocide.

What this apparent reversal reveals, according to Levin, is that the real fight isn’t about freedom of speech, but about “the purpose of the university,” and so it has been since the 1960s:

The only positive effect of the campus crisis that followed October 7 has been the clarity it has provided. We have entered a phase of the university crisis in which this character of the dispute is clearer than ever. And it is therefore a phase in which the potential for some effective action against the academic revolutionaries and in defense of the traditional ethos of the university may be greater than it has been in half a century.

Yesterday I saw an unconfirmed report that the Biden administration has offered Israel a massive arms deal in exchange for a promise not to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. Even if the report is incorrect, there is plenty of other evidence that the White House has been trying to dissuade Jerusalem from mounting such an attack. The thinking behind this pressure is hard to fathom, as there is little Israel could do that would better serve American interests in the Middle East than putting some distance between the ayatollahs and nuclear weapons. Aaron MacLean explains why this is so, in the context of a broader discussion of strategic priorities in the Middle East and elsewhere:

If the Iran issue were satisfactorily adjusted in the direction of the American interest, the question of Israel’s security would become more manageable overnight. If a network of American partners enjoyed security against state predation, the proactive suppression of militarily less serious threats like Islamic State would be more easily organized—and indeed, such partners would be less vulnerable to the manipulation of powers external to the region.

[The Biden administration’s] commitment to escalation avoidance has had the odd effect of making the security situation in the region look a great deal as it would if America had actually withdrawn [from the Middle East].

Alternatively, we could project competence by effectively backing our Middle East partners in their competitions against their enemies, who are also our enemies, by ensuring a favorable overall balance of power in the region by means of our partnership network, and by preventing Iran from achieving nuclear status—even if it courts escalation with Iran in the shorter run.