Many are cheering the University of Mississippi fraternity brothers who answered campus protestors with a loud rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner, as well as the clever minds who launched a Go Fund Me campaign to hire a Mariachi band to play at the University of Pennsylvania’s encampment. These and other similarly spirited responses to the unchecked rage and resentment unleashed across academia are unendingly satisfying because they show that students, unlike their school administrators, understand the nature of the threat they face and are willing to confront it. 

The demonstrations happening across American campuses are not political but spiritual contests. Violence is the opening act: It lowers the threshold of tolerance for any behavior that doesn’t draw blood. Then, “peaceful” protests are allowed to disrupt daily life for weeks on end, draining the spirit of the campus and everyone on it with a drumbeat of seething anger and bitterness. 

Those with firmly held views seeking positive change don’t scream at their classmates and create zones of segregation and intimidation. What we’re seeing today aren’t protests for a purpose; the protests are the purpose, and that purpose is to degrade and destroy.

The “tell” is in the composition of the crowds: The rent-by-the-hour-activists are always there, handing out masks and other sponsored supplies. They are a venal, soulless lot, imported by their handlers not to rally school spirit, but to crush it. 

School faculty and administrators shamelessly participate as well. Once upon a time these adults would have had the personal and professional integrity to practice their politics three blocks off campus. Now they use their status to inflame rather than decrease tensions. The spirit that animates any teacher to lower him- or herself to the role of agitator among young adults is one that every campus should exorcise as part of the hiring process. 

Low-information student protestors swept up in the energy of the moment are often the most dispiriting sight of all. I stood next to a young Asian woman at a recent demonstration: She was there alone, expressionless, her face moving only while robotically repeating word for word everything the woman with the bullhorn yelled. Nothing is more soul crushing than allowing others to dictate your speech. That young woman reminded me that even a mind powerful enough to earn its way into a top university can still be easily captured. 

Some are there to defend innocent Palestinians or to sincerely question American foreign policy, but they are often outnumbered. These NGO-funded disruptions specialize in producing and attracting restless souls who spread chaos and division under the banner of whatever the declared cause of the day may be. The objective is always to poison the air and to force others to then breathe it in. 

There is a right to free speech, no matter how manufactured or offensive. There is no right, though, to free rein. Protestors, sincere or otherwise, cannot displace students trying to study for finals, get to class, graduate, or just enjoy a sunny afternoon on the main lawn. Yet they do exactly that because the spirit of academia is broken. There is no one to stop them.

Ever since social-distancing exemptions were made for BLM demonstrations during Covid, protests in the name of the “oppressed” have become sanctuaries of unrestricted accommodation for those who want to be oppressors. Weak or sympathetic university presidents dare not stand in their way. They likely wouldn’t permit cigar smokers to light up in their main dining halls, but they righteously allow protestors to stage sit-ins at their libraries during finals week and call it the spirit of democracy. 

The majority of students know it is actually the spirit of capitulation. They don’t want to live like this, but they can’t find anyone with the courage to course-correct. The battle for the soul of these schools rests with them. 

So, they rally around the American flag to defend it at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and dance on a party bus outside of Columbia University in the show of spirit their administrators are not able to muster. They understand that a darkness is being allowed to hover over their campuses, and that their job is to bring the light. 

The contrast between them and the mob is clarifying. The chasm between breaking into song and breaking into a building is where the dividing line between the spirit of good faith and bad faith is most visible, and where this spiritual war is being fought. Enervated school leadership either can’t or won’t recognize it. Luckily for us all, so many incredible young people do.