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mine who are our friends and who are our enemies according to whether they help U.S. imperialism or fight to defeat it.”

The same logic animates today’s radicals. Hamas is their equivalent of Che Guevara or the Viet Cong, and Israel an expression of Western imperialism that must be opposed at all costs. (The Weather Underground statement does briefly mention “Israeli imperialism.”) A key difference between 1968 and today is that protestors then were revolting against an institution dominated by traditional liberals, whereas the radicals have steadily taken over the universities since. Today’s protestors are only crudely expressing the attitudes and tropes that they hear in many of their classrooms. A large contingent of Columbia faculty walked out to protest the arrests of the agitators.

Columbia 1968 is widely seen as a hugely influential event in the direction of academia. It will be a calamity if Columbia 2024 is eventually viewed the same way.

Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.

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