A special note from the editor about this issue.

TWO DAYS after Hamas brutally attacked Israel, killing more than 1,000 people and kidnapping more than 200, Lawrence H. Summers took to X to vent his displeasure at the university he once led. “In nearly 50 years of @Harvard affiliation,” he wrote, “I have never been as disillusioned and alienated as I am today.” At issue was the failure of Harvard administrators to publicly condemn the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, even though campus leaders previously spoke out on such matters as police violence against Black Americans and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. (Indeed, the Ukrainian flag was flown over Harvard Yard.) Summers smelled a double standard. He wasn’t alone.

Student groups rushed to fill the void. In a now notorious joint statement released on the evening of October 7, some 30 student organizations declared “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” The backlash was swift, prompting weeks of intense debate about whether higher education has an antisemitism problem. The controversy shows no sign of abating. Proxy battles are waged via open letters, campus protests, counterprotests, donor revolts, doxxing trucks, even death threats. Several articles in this issue of The Chronicle are meant to examine what’s happening — and why it matters.

According to Geoff Shullenberger, we are witnessing the end of an era in campus speech that began with Charles Murray’s melee-provoking visit to Middlebury College in 2017. Since then, in incident after incident, “advocates of free speech have faced off against those alleging the speech in question would harm vulnerable groups,” Shullenberger writes, and colleges have tended to come down on the side of protecting vulnerable groups. That approach was held together by a largely unspoken assumption that it is always possible, even easy, to determine who needs protection — who is the oppressed and who is the oppressor. That assumption crumbled on October 7.

Elsewhere in this issue, my colleague Len Gutkin, a senior editor at The Chronicle Review and author of its brilliant newsletter, revisits a previous high-water mark of campus militancy, the 1960s, to examine the promises and pathologies of today’s campus activism. It is the differences between then and now that are most striking. For one thing, the 1960s saw much more violence. Another crucial distinction: “In the ’60s,” Len notes, “student activists did not seek the approval of college administrators — they sought freedom from them. Nowadays, students crave institutional affirmation.”

The post-October 7 reckoning on campuses has lent fresh urgency to highly contested questions. To what extent have colleges, often with the best of intentions, created an expectation of institutional affirmation, especially among students and alumni? Should colleges be in the business of validating viewpoints, offering up institutional imprimaturs as a kind of Good Housekeeping seal of the just and good? Or is that a recipe for disappointment and disillusionment?