Reflecting on his own campus career as a conservative Catholic dissident, Matthew J. Franck examines the intellectual roots of protests at Yale, Harvard, the University of Missouri, and elsewhere. He locates them in failures of the humanities and social sciences, which have abandoned the quest for truth:

[T]ruth, as an inter-subjective possibility where minds can meet, has been sent packing from the contemporary university, and “commitment” to what is true “for me” has taken its place.

Unlike argument, passionate commitment seeks no interlocutor, no partner in pursuit of knowledge or of the good. It requires the dutiful listener, obsequiously acquiescing in demands, giving way to one after another until the passion is spent and anger mollified—for now. Passionate commitment is willing to shriek obscenities, and thus prides itself on its authenticity. Since it usually gets its way, why shouldn’t it?

The professors and administrators who have lately been flummoxed by student protesters should reflect on the extent to which they are now on the receiving end of lessons they themselves have spent years teaching.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.