In a recent essay, the First Amendment scholar Lee Bollinger—who has served as president of both Columbia University and the University of Michigan—put forth a robust defense of universities and the importance of liberal education, in opposition to the current administration’s efforts to hold these institutions accountable for their misdeeds. The problem, writes Peter Berkowitz, isn’t Bollinger’s view of what the university should be, but the fact that that American colleges fall so dramatically short:

Freedom of thought and expression ought to be among our universities’ most essential values. Yet it is universities’ propensity to censor and indoctrinate—along with their protracted violation of civil rights—that spurred the Trump administration, however much it may have overreached, to leverage federal funding to impel them to practice free speech and respect the law.

Bollinger performs in his essay a valuable service. His account of universities as they ought to be provides a devasting indictment of what our elite universities have become, not least Columbia under his 21 years of stewardship. . . . These betrayals—as at elite universities throughout the land—provide fertile breeding ground for anti-Semitism. America’s most selective institutions of higher education have encouraged students to believe that expressing opinions that challenge progressive orthodoxy and failing to affirm progressive orthodoxy are both forms of violence.

Indeed, Berkowitz points out, the already alarmingly high percentage of Columbia students who fear expressing their political opinions increased not after the Trump administration’s new policies, but after the anti-Israel encampments and demonstrations began in the fall of 2023.

Yesterday, the Iranian foreign minister flew to Geneva to meet with European diplomats. President Trump, meanwhile, indicated that cease-fire negotiations might soon begin with Iran, which would presumably involve Tehran agreeing to make concessions regarding its nuclear program, while Washington pressures Israel to halt its military activities. According to Israeli media, Iran already began putting out feelers to the U.S. earlier this week. Aviram Bellaishe considers the purpose of these overtures:

The regime’s request to return to negotiations stems from the principle of deception and delay that has guided it for decades. Iran wants to extricate itself from a situation of total destruction of its nuclear facilities. It understands that to save the nuclear program, it must stop at a point that would allow it to return to it in the shortest possible time. So long as the negotiation process leads to halting strikes on its military capabilities and preventing the destruction of the nuclear program, and enables the transfer of enriched uranium to a safe location, it can simultaneously create the two tracks in which it specializes—a false facade of negotiations alongside a hidden nuclear race.