Evict the squatters because our universities are still worth saving

American universities are under attack, and I don’t mean by President Donald Trump.The biggest threat facing Harvard, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia and others — institutions with storied histories going back to before the founding of the United States — is coming from within, from activist thugs high on their own idealism. But that’s no reason to abandon them entirely, or to burn them to the ground.Those who took them over and remade them into leftist ideological wastelands don’t own them; they’re just squatting.These schools are our nation’s oldest institutions, counting our founding fathers among their alumni, serving for centuries as stewards of our culture, letters and the arts.Once they upheld a mission to cherish and pass on the ideals of Western civilization.That is their legacy and their worth.They can be those protectors again.Administrative bloat and activist intellectuals have taken over these campuses, but the bones of intellectual inquiry and academic rigor remain to be recaptured.We cannot cede them to the barbarians who have sauntered through the gates only to vandalize their campuses, literally and figuratively.The mission of our oldest schools was once well understood: to preserve American culture, to teach what is good in us, and to constantly question what we believe and why, so that we can rule our ideas and not be ruled by them.Universities must graduate future leaders who think critically, who are not governed by ideology.Some new schools dedicated to those principles have emerged in recent years, including the University of Austin.

Launched by The Free Press’ Bari Weiss and other rebellious thinkers, it boasts a formidable faculty “dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth.”Ralston College in Savannah, Ga., founded in 2010, focuses on the classics as “a revival and reinvention of the traditional university.”Still other colleges have been remade, such as the New College of Florida, a once-woke sc...