Harvard University recently put the campus Christian group Harvard College Faith and Action on “administrative probation” for pressuring a student to resign from the group’s leadership because she is in a lesbian relationship. Andrew T. Walker comments:

Harvard has now taken to disciplining a Christian student group—and not some radical fringe group, but the largest Christian group on campus—for the group’s expectation that its student leadership follow Christian ethical teachings on sexuality. . . .

Gone ought to be any pretense that universities such as Harvard are in any sense interested in diversity or tolerance. Secular campuses that traffic in diversity, and who worship at the altar of intersectionality, while singling out Christians for holding to Christian doctrine and then penalizing them for it, [are guilty of bald-faced] hypocrisy. And in this case, hypocrisy is the tribute that liberalism pays to vice.

But even on the relative scale of liberal hypocrisy, Harvard is a special case: the school was founded explicitly on Protestant, even Puritan faith and is now penalizing a group for holding to religious convictions that would have been identical to its founders’ views. All in the name of enforcing doctrinaire liberal politics. The shift is so radical that while just a few decades ago it took some courage to be openly gay at Harvard, these days it takes a great deal of courage to be openly Christian.

Sadly, the spectacle at Harvard is hardly unique.

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.