How to fix the Ivy League

America’s grandest universities have had a humbling few months. Administrators—many of whom had embraced social-justice activism and often promulgated their views on current affairs—went strangely mute after Hamas’s attack on October 7th, in which about 1,200 Israelis were killed. Loud opposition to oppression of all kinds turned timid when one of the oldest prejudices, antisemitism, reared its ugly head on elite campuses. Donors revolted. The president of the University of Pennsylvania resigned in December after widely derided testimony before Congress, in which she struggled to say whether students who call for the genocide of Jews ought to be punished. The similarly hapless president of Harvard, who in addition faced accusations of plagiarism, was forced to do the same.On their own, these embarrassments are not an existential threat to the standing of America’s most vaunted universities. Their ability to anoint America’s aspiring elites remains intact—as do their eye-wateringly large financial endowments. But the fiascos of recent months have exposed .