Coming full circle at Columbia University.

Student protesters block the media from entering a tent camp on the campus of Columbia University in New York on Wednesday, April 24, 2024. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey)

Some good comes from everything – even the worst of things.

In support of that assertion, I offer the anti-Jewish, anti-American, pro-idiot protests now happening on elite college campuses such as Columbia University. The good that I see is the growing awareness – particularly among the parents of college-aged kids – that something has gone terribly wrong in American higher education.

It has been a long time coming. Those of us that are old enough remember the campus protests of the 1960s. We have, in a way, come full circle. Columbia University was the site of the first of a series of demonstrations against the Vietnam War on college campuses that began in the spring of 1968.

At Columbia, militant students staged protests that included taking over Hamilton Hall, a building that housed both classrooms and administration offices. Administrators at Columbia were eventually forced to call in the NYPD to restore order. (Give them credit. At least those kids understood what they were protesting.)

The March 1968 Columbia University protest is credited with starting the campus protest movement. It’s also credited by some scholars with pushing American higher education sharply to the left. In his book, The Closing of the American Mind,” University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom said, “American universities were no longer places of intellectual and academic debate, but rather places of ‘political correctness’ and liberalism.”

So, here we are, 56 years later back at Columbia, and that leftward push now has American higher education on the edge of the Marxist abyss. Examples abound. Here’s one.

Thanks to the reporting of Cal Thomas at Townhall.com, we are introduced to Professor Mohamed Abdou, who is described on Columbia’s website as, “…a North African-Egyptian Muslim anarchist interdisciplinary activist-scholar of Indigenous, Black, critical race and Islamic studies, as well as gender, sexuality, abolition and decolonization.”

Said professor Abdou on his social media feed, “Yes, I’m with Hamas and Hezbollah and Islamic jihad.”

(And to think you can get this for your kid for just 90 grand a year.)

The good that comes from this is that even the casual observer can now see the leftist rot in American higher education in its full flower.

That clarity has parents asking very pointed questions about what a lifetime spent saving up is going to pay for at the colleges their sons and daughters want to attend. Wealthy alums are closing their checkbooks. New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft is one such alum. He made that announcement this week, saying, “The school I love so much – the one that welcomed me and provided me with so much opportunity – is no longer an institution I recognize.”

It took a long time for the higher education pendulum to swing so far to the left. It will take time for it to swing back. But perhaps that swing has begun. If so, good for Bob Kraft and others like him. And good for the parents who are asking the tough questions. Perhaps we are seeing a long overdue awakening and a critical first step on the long road to restoring sanity to American higher education.