Two things can be true at once: 1) The universities that have decided on a policy of “institutional neutrality”—that is, they will not take official university positions or make official institutional statements about current affairs—have made the right choice. And 2) They are deserving of our contempt for the path that brought them here.

What happened is this: Campuses that allowed for the creation and maintenance of “Jew-free zones” were sued over the clear violation of Jewish students’ civil rights. Pro-Hamas groups fired back, and also filed complaints against these universities—except their complaints, revealed in June, were often that some schools condemned Hamas’s October 7 barbarism in the first place.

What this means to the universities is that they can either continue releasing statements on all manner of hot-button issues, including the murder and sexual torture of Jewish civilians, or they can put a sock in it. They are choosing the latter.

The libertarian group FIRE is keeping a running list of schools declaring their institutional neutrality. The list includes Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford, so-called “elite” universities that struggled with anti-Israel encampments. Columbia and Harvard, it should be noted, will begin this school year with new presidents.

To be clear, some of the schools on that list had already been trying to avoid Columbia and Harvard’s fate. Daniel Diermeier became chancellor of Vanderbilt University four years ago. Before that, he was provost at the University of Chicago, which a decade ago published an institutional free-speech manifesto that other schools have since adopted. Diermeier has brought his U of Chicago principles with him to Vanderbilt, and has now very clearly broken through the student body’s attempts to negate his commitment to free expression.

At an orientation meeting for new students, the New York Times reports, Diermeier got right to the point: “The university would not divest from Israel.

“It would not banish provocative speakers.

“It would not issue statements in support or condemnation of Israeli or Palestinian causes.”

Colleges in the hands of folks like Diermeier are in better shape going into the next stage in this fight because to a large degree, personnel is policy. So the schools that are just now taking their first steps in the right direction are trying to impose values that the institution itself has never modeled.

Additionally, the entire structure of the “safe space” generation of schooling was constructed in bad faith. Much like DEI and other race-essentialist competitions, no one was ever in danger from “Zionists” (read: Jews) on campus. The whole production had one specific goal, which anti-Zionist groups are finally elucidating in clear terms. Last week, an imam headlining a Zoom teach-in hosted by Columbia’s Students for Justice in Palestine said this about Jewish professor Shai Davidai, who has been hounded for his criticism of genocidal anti-Semitism:

“If there’s one professor, like that Shai Davidai guy, how do we get him in trouble? What are the ways in which his professorship is sort of tenuous, or maybe in jeopardy, or at what point will it be in jeopardy? How do we create a situation in which he’s in jeopardy? In a particular situation that might have more impact and it might silence—this is what the Zionists do—that might silence 100 other professors. If you’re able to take out somebody like that, and make an example of them, it might shut up 100 more…. What’s our biggest threat here? What’s our biggest opportunity? Which domino, if we knock it over, is going to knock 20 dominoes over?”

What too many administrators, journalists, and even groups like FIRE never understood (or never wanted to admit) was that if the anti-Israel movement on campus had one single ethos, it was: “How do we create a situation in which he’s in jeopardy?”

Free speech was always at the center of it, but just not the way it has been portrayed. The goal was to eliminate Jewish students’ freedom of speech (and, eventually, of association, and even of movement) on campus. The speech of Anti-Zionists was not in danger—though they were occasionally told not to take hostages in university buildings and not to set up Jew-free zones on campus. What they were protecting was their ability to silence others.

A school like Columbia, where a pro-Hamas student group holds events explicitly designed to extinguish basic civil rights on campus, is in more trouble than schools like Vanderbilt (and University of Chicago, Purdue, and others), because its students have no need to even hide the ball anymore. The institution has already been converted from a university into a theater of political warfare.

The fall of Columbia is a cautionary tale in what happens when important elite American institutions believe they can jettison, without consequences, the American values that made them important and elite in the first place.