If you were appalled by last week's organized insurrection on Capitol Hill by Congressional Democrats, then you are probably apoplectic about this week's organized nonsense at Columbia - now spilling over into Trump Tower. The immediate casus belli: the expulsion of three Columbia students (the first in over 50 years) and the imprisonment by ICE of activist Mahmoud Khalil, easily the most prominent figure in Columbia’s campus unrest. But the fight was truly joined last week when President Trump announced that he was rescinding “$400 million from Columbia University, canceling grants and contracts because of what the government describes as the Ivy League school’s failure to squelch antisemitism on campus.” https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/07/us/columbia-university-grants-canceled-trump/index.html

Their common objective from the streets of New York to the halls of Congress: Militant resistance to Donald Trump as well as an upturned middle finger to those uppity, un-woke Americans who so unwisely elected him. Direct control over government spending is the lifeblood of Democratic practice and ideology, no matter how else they spin it. The common tactic: A quasi-religious fervor of Us against Them, with no insult too demeaning, no syllogism too outrageous to be re-purposed into the mob’s tiresome litanies.

All you need to know about Columbia is that some of its faculty “canceled in-person classes on Monday in support of…Khalil, the student activist and foreign national whom the Trump administration moved to deport…The cancellations…put the professors at odds with Columbia’s provost, who emailed “faculty colleagues” Monday morning to issue “a reminder that faculty must meet all scheduled classes.” Perhaps we will learn later if the activists who stealthily infiltrated Trump Tower on Thursday morning before beginning their demonstration were Columbia students with excused class absences– or not even students at all. https://tjvnews.com/2025/03/columbia-professors-cancel-classes-in-solidarity-with-pro-hamas-activist-in-ice-custody/

However, it takes a truly distinguished professor like Charles Lipson, now emeritus from the University of Chicago political science department, to provide the most accurate (and disturbing) assessment of an activist student body, egged on by “illiberal faculty” and largely tolerated by gutless administrators.

“The failure of university leaders to punish these violations is especially troubling. They have a basic duty to keep students and faculty safe, to preserve and nourish a benign environment for teaching, learning and research. They are failing in that basic duty. University trustees, who should hold them accountable, are also failing. Their failure yields a predictable result: still more disruptions going forward. That’s exactly what is happening now.” https://thespectator.com/topic/columbia-university-exemplifies-failure-universities/

As Professor Lipson also points out, add an unjust District Attorney like Alvin Bragg and New Yorkers have a real mess on their hands

So where do we go from here? Perhaps the first step is intellectual: Recognizing that using the campus to poison the minds of our youth is actually our widest and most insidious form of child abuse. Even if we occasionally find ourselves bold enough to denounce “campus indoctrination” (despite the danger of being denounced as reactionaries or worse) do we truly understand the generational risks we’re taking? President Reagan clearly did when he reminded his audiences that we were never more than a generation away from losing our freedom. Isn’t it time we began considering campus reform as a long-term, multi-front, multi-generational war?

The religious overtones of the woke movement remind me of discovering later in life a truth that most of my Christian colleagues still find surprising. Great apostles like Peter and Paul were actually insurgents, spreading Christianity despite Roman persecution, often at great personal risk. With my extensive background in counter-insurgency, I was startled to read in the concluding verses of Paul’s letter to the Philippian church, “All the saints salute you, chiefly they that are of Caesar’s household.” What? How did St. Paul the Insurgent insert himself into the heart of the beast through Christians who somehow managed to become members of Caesar’s household? Philippians 4:22 (KJV)

The same Roman Empire which executed both Paul and Peter became known, roughly 200 years later, as the Holy Roman Empire, although it was often none of those things. But never fail to appreciate Christian insurgency as a world-changing event (an appropriate thought this Easter season :-).

However, if we still value the history of western thought underlying our culture, can we ensure its survival by aggressively defending our educational heritage? And can we fight those battles anew in every state university, alumni committee and board of directors? Most important of all: Before writing any donor checks to our most beloved colleges!

COL (Ret.) Ken Allard was an Army draftee who became a West Point professor, Dean of the National War College and NBC News military analyst.