The percentage of Arab students at the Technion, Israel’s prestigious science and engineering university, has tripled over the past quarter-century, bringing it into line with the proportion of Arabs in the general population. Many of these students are women, and they are not only matriculating, but graduating. Peter Coy explains how this came to be:

How did Arabs manage to gain such a solid foothold at the Technion? One factor . . . is a network of excellent private schools for Arabs. Many are run by Arab Christians but are open to Muslims as well. The Israeli government has provided funding to those schools based on attendance, similar to voucher systems in the U.S. Education is seen as a pathway out of poverty by many Arab Christians.

Jewish philanthropists including Benny and Patsy Landa helped kick the Technion’s efforts into a higher gear about a decade ago. . . . Other philanthropists have since made donations. The Higher Education Council of Israel added support as well, mostly over the past five years.

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.