I’ve received several advanced degrees, including my Ph.D., from Columbia University. I taught at Barnard, its sister college, and spent more than a decade reporting on the goings-on in Morningside Heights. Ever since the Tentifada began, I contacted deans and administrators and professors and asked them all what they intended to do now that violence was afoot and cheers for a terrorist group were heard everywhere on their campus. These women and men will not, thanks to their tenure, suffer consequences for speaking the truth—and that is precisely why we have tenure. And yet, to a person, they just mumbled about “working behind the scenes” and “monitoring the situation closely.”

And that, alas, is the real grim news out of Columbia or most any universities these days. You can fire one bumbling president for mishandling a crisis, but the only available successors seem similarly small-minded and weak-willed. By design, the universities are stacked with bureaucratic mediocrities all the way down: if you imagine the modern university as a battleground in an effort to produce a new generation of conformists ready to march in lockstep for whatever cause is deemed to serve “social justice,” you need overseers ready, willing, and able to abandon critical thinking and courage. There could be no more fitting testament to this state of being than Columbia’s decision to cancel its commencement, an admission that it is not really a university anymore.