From chants to “Globalise the Intifada” on the leafy campuses of New England to anti-colonial vandalism in 700-year-old Oxbridge colleges, the more prestigious the university, the more amenable it seems to anti-West radicalism.

Last week, Sciences Po – the Paris university that serves as a finishing school for France’s elite – was accused of being “ruined by woke radicals” in a book by a Le Figaro journalist. Similar accusations are made against Harvard, Yale and Columbia in the United States and Oxford and Cambridge in Britain.

Trans rights, climate change, and Black Lives Matter have all been sources of fierce student protest in recent years. But nothing appears to have radicalised elite students more than the war in Gaza. Israel’s response to the attack by Hamas on October 7 has emerged as the principal motivation for protests by some of the highest-status students in the world – those who supposedly work to the highest standards and expect to reap the rewards of their privilege as future, highly-paid leaders in business, politics, and law.

A disproportionate number of students at elite universities are also from middle-class backgrounds. In 2023, one in three successful Oxford applicants and a quarter of successful Cambridge applicants came from private schools.