Only Foundational Reforms Can Stop Universities from Playing Politics

Is the worm at long last turning? For years we have marveled at the willingness of trustees, donors, and alumni to tolerate the politicization of American universities by an illiberal coalition of "woke" progressives, adherents of "critical race theory," and apologists for Islamist extremism.

But in the past two weeks, the backlash has finally come. There has been widespread outrage at the weasel words emanating from college presidents in response to odious pro-Hamas statements by militant faculty members—such as the Stanford lecturer who made Jewish students stand in the classroom corner and declared them "colonizers"—and radical student groups, perhaps most infamously at Harvard, that sought to hold Israel "entirely responsible" for the Hamas terrorists' sadistic rampage.

In 1927 the French philosopher Julien Benda published Le trahison des clercs—"The Treason of the Intellectuals"—which condemned the descent of European intellectuals into extreme nationalism and racism. A century later, American academia has gone in the opposite political direction—leftwards instead of rightwards—but has ended up in the same place, celebrating political violence.