America’s top universities have, over the past several decades, consolidated and nationalized the role they had carved out for themselves in New England in the years of the early republic: They are the formatory institutions of the political class of this nation. Their graduates will expect to fashion the rules, and rule the fashions, of this nation. They will man the bureaucracies and shape the political and social norms for their entire country.
No testament to their inadequacy for this role could be more comprehensive than the encampment at Columbia University, which the NYPD finally was called in to clear on Tuesday night: full of masked students shouting half-understood Islamist slogans — “Globalize the Intifada” — and intimidating “Zionist” students, guarded from exposure by the media, or punishment from the administration, by a phalanx of tenured professors, also shouting slogans from behind masks.
Comments