Earlier this year, Columbia University was hit with what sophisticated PR types call a double whammy. On the morning of May 7, New Yorkmagazine posted “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College,” a 5,000-word exposé of ChatGPT reliance at the Upper West Side institution. Later that same day, 80 pro-Hamas demonstrators stormed the campus’s Butler Library, rechristening the school “the Basel Al-Araj Popular University” and staying until hauled out by police several hours later. Although American colleges had been under popular suspicion for years—not least since elite campuses responded to the latest Gaza terrorism with an outpouring of antisemitic bile—Columbia’s day from hell seemed a culmination. If academic dishonesty was ubiquitous and campus politics had gone mad, what, exactly, was the point of higher education?