This month, we’re sending our kids back to school, which for too many Americans means returning them to the halls of a failing public school.

But it could be worse. For example, your child could be headed back to Columbia or Harvard or Penn, or to some other equally rotten Ivy League school. If so, you can expect them to be indoctrinated anew on the virtues of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and on the evils of white supremacy, and on the righteousness of the “Palestinian” cause and the insidiousness of the Israeli cause, which apparently poses a greater threat to world peace and global and prosperity than, say, a Chinese bioweapon or an Iranian nuke.

So if your kid has instead been consigned to one of those compass-point colleges or land-grant state schools, well, count your blessings.

We say all this amid the news yesterday that Columbia’s beleaguered president, Minouche Shafik, has decided to, er, spend more time with her family. As the New York Post reports, “Shafik suddenly resigned Wednesday and is escaping back to her home country after leading the elite institution for less than a year that was marked by constant — and sometimes destructive — anti-Israel protests.”

In a letter to the student body, Shafik said she’d be “stepping down,” and she pointed to the recent “period of turmoil” as the cause of it. “This period has taken a considerable toll on my family,” she wrote, “as it has for others in our community.” Those unnamed “others” in the Columbia community would no doubt include the school’s considerable Jewish population, which has been made to feel very afraid due to the failure of Shafik and her lieutenants to stamp out the Jew-hatred in their midst and within their ranks.

Shafik thus becomes the third Ivy League leader to step down, joining former Harvard President Claudine Gay and UPenn President Liz Magill, both of whom resigned in disgrace in the wake of their all-too-public evisceration by New York Congresswoman and Harvard graduate Elise Stefanik at an April 17 congressional hearing. (We should note that while Gay ultimately resigned amid plagiarism allegations, she was already on thin ice due to her refusal to denounce the anti-Semitism on the Cambridge campus.)

As for Shafik, when asked about whether mobs of people shouting “Long live the intifada” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free” were anti-Semitic statements, she disgracefully answered, “It’s a difficult issue.”

Difficult for whom?

The toll-taking “period” to which Shafik refers is one of the ugliest and most shameful in the history of American higher education. As Inside Higher Ed writes:

The protests at Columbia — which set off a wave of similar demonstrations at colleges across the nation — culminated in the construction of an encampment in the center of campus and the occupation of an administrative building for nearly two weeks, resulting in the arrest of more than 100 protesters in April.

How bad was it at Columbia, and how pathetic was the school’s response? As one 2024 Columbia graduate, Yola Ashkenazie, herself a Jew, noted on Fox News this morning, one of her fellow Columbia students had gone on Instagram to say that the rest of us “should be grateful that they are not going out and murdering Zionists.” She added, “And guess what? That student is set to return to Columbia this fall.”

Clearly, Shafik has failed. But we needn’t shed any tears for her. As the Post continues, she’s “leaving the prestigious [sic] school to return to the United Kingdom — where she spent most of her career — for a gig with its foreign secretary as a chair tasked with reviewing the government’s approach to international development.”

Fine. And good riddance. At least she won’t be in a position to enable the corruption of young minds.

All this comes at a price, though. As our Emmy Griffin noted in May, wealthy Jewish donors have snapped shut their wallets and pocketbooks, many students are now looking to schools outside the prestigious Ivy League, and 13 federal judges told Shafik that they wouldn’t hire any Columbia students “because of the school’s inept handling of the encampments and protests.”

As for the future of American higher education, things might seem bleak, but all isn’t lost. There are pockets of hope. As The Wall Street Journal reports, “The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill is opening the doors at its new school committed to free expression, after hiring 11 faculty, including seven tenure-line positions.”

The Journal adds, “Students will be introduced to materials like the Federalist Papers, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and philosophical predecessors including Aristotle and Montesquieu. The goal is creating an environment where, as dean Jed Atkins puts it, ‘students can disagree better.’”

In other words, students can be introduced to what higher education once was, and ought once again become.

Updated with additional info about the consequences of Columbia’s failure to confront anti-Semitism on its campus.