Syed Farook, who carried out the San Bernardino terror attack with his wife, was an American citizen who attended school in the U.S. for twelve years, as well as four years of college. To Jonathan Zimmerman, some old ideas about education might have set Farook on a different course:

Our schools are our central public mechanism for making Americans—that is, for socializing the young into the norms, traditions, and beliefs of the nation. Or at least they used to be. Remember civics education? When Americans created our common school system, in the early 19th century, civic purposes lay at its heart. In a new nation of enormous diversity, the argument went, we needed schools to foster a shared American identity and consciousness.

Civic goals remained central to education into the 20th century, when schools developed formal courses to teach children about their rights and responsibilities as Americans. But these efforts started to fade in the wake of the Vietnam war and the Watergate scandal. . . . By the time Syed Farook went to school, he may have been getting very little of this sort of education.

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.