Donald Trump won a return to the White House in no small part because America’s progressive elites alienated significant swathes of working-class and middle-class Americans. For decades, progressive elites have exercised near-hegemonic control over America’s highly selective colleges and universities. They have used that power to incubate ideas, hone rhetoric, cultivate sensibilities, refine manners, and inspire policies to enable their graduates to instruct and govern the nation. Instead, their graduates’ ideas, rhetoric, sensibilities, manners, and policies drove a diverse array of ordinary Americans into the arms of Donald Trump’s Republican Party.

It is dawning on some who run our elite colleges and universities – and the intellectuals whom they read – that their institutions desperately need reform. But the administrators and intellectuals assiduously avoid the core matter, which is the transformation of liberal education into progressive indoctrination. To promulgate and shield progressive shibboleths, our top colleges and universities discourage free speech and open inquiry. They pigeonhole people, allocating benefits and burdens based on race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, and gender. And they organize the curriculum to inculcate progressive ideology and promote progressive activism.

The appalling response of numerous students, faculty, and administrators at America’s most prestigious universities to the Iran-backed Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacres in southern Israel shocked parents, politicians, and donors. Long before then, universities had lost sight of their mission – to transmit knowledge about the humanities and sciences, enliven the moral imagination, foster civility and toleration, encourage the free and energetic exchange of opinions, and cultivate independent thought. But the outrageous statements and shameful conduct of key components of the campus community following the jihadists’ barbaric assault on mostly civilian targets in southern Israel attracted national coverage. Nonspecialists could see for themselves the poisonous fruits of decades of educational malpractice.

For the rest of the 2023-24 academic year, a vocal minority of students celebrated Hamas’ mass-murder of civilians. They occupied campus property in defiance of university rules but with the acquiescence of university administrators. And they advocated the globalization of the intifada – that is, extending the atrocities the jihadists perpetrated against allegedly settler-colonialist Israel to allegedly settler-colonialist America and allegedly settler-colonialist nations throughout the West.

Professors at Columbia, Cornell, and Yale

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