The Hamas pogrom of Oct. 7 shook the ground beneath the ivory tower as superheated ideological forces erupted in geysers of ignorance and hate.

The sacred mission of universities has always been to preserve, transmit, and extend knowledge. For centuries, institutions sought out capable students and competed for excellent teachers, scholars, and researchers. The best of them attracted intellectually eager students, seduced to the point of daydreams by the romantic idea of a rigorous and comprehensive education .

A new Gallup poll found that America's confidence in higher education plummeted from 57% in 2015 to 36% today. Support is down across all demographics — and for good reason. Many universities no longer cherish our ancestral legacy of wisdom and knowledge and are now more likely to indoctrinate students than to educate them. Elite schools, in particular, judge applicants as much by their devotion to community service and activism as by their academic potential. Students demand that universities advance any number of causes under the umbrella of social justice, and many institutions now require faculty to prove their commitment to DEI imperatives.

These trends are bearing bitter fruit. Much of higher education now effectively consists in giving students a handful of Post-it notes and teaching them how to apply them to the images that are projected on their smartphones. People of color who are evidently miserable and poor are labeled “victims,” whose innocence is not only assumed but unchallengeable, at least on campus. Predominantly white, well-off, and educated people, especially those with a strong national identity, are identified as “colonizers” and “oppressors.”

Little wonder that so many students at leading universities and colleges support Hamas and vilify Jews. They are simply playing the crude intellectual game they have learned in the classroom — one that unfolds in the immediate present and involves no depth or breadth of understanding.

How many students who stand with Hamas have read its charter, which calls for the genocidal elimination of the Jews? Do they know that Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which embraced Hitler’s antisemitism and learned propaganda at the feet of the Nazis? Do they know what is at stake in Israel’s war against the Islamists? Or that the Jews are always the canary in the coal mine when it comes to civilizational destruction? Do they know what civilization is, what its preconditions are, and how it is threatened by barbaric evil? Can they recognize evil when it is right before their eyes?

Don’t bet on any of these things.

Were higher education alive and well, students and faculty would come together on college campuses to explore fundamental questions raised by the atrocities of Oct. 7. Instead, young people are chanting slogans they picked up on campus and social media. Do these campus radicals realize that “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is a call to genocide ?

Academic leaders and professors have little interest in asking fundamental questions. That’s because doing so would expose them to vilification by mobs of useful idiots led by bad actors. But real education cannot be undertaken apart from open inquiry and civil discourse. Ignoring the rising pressure beneath the ivory tower’s foundations won’t prevent future eruptions.

There is nevertheless some basis for hope. The letter and spirit of liberal education are alive in a significant minority of academics, and the proliferation of classical and Christian academies and homeschooling shows that demand for it is strong. It is time for new institutions of higher learning to preserve and renew the mission of education.

The University of Austin launched in part to meet the needs of students who hunger for open inquiry and civil discourse at a time when the traditional university has abandoned the field. Universities that recruit and train activists must rededicate themselves to educating thinkers and forming citizens. They must equip the next generation of students with the tools they need to defend civilization from cultural amnesia and ideological destruction — only then will universities restore trust among the public.

At its heart, education confronts what Henry Adams described as “the problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity.” Order, direction, discipline, and unity make for whole human beings and flourishing societies. They are urgently necessary in our time of chaos, aimlessness, unbridled impulse, and confused multiplicity.

Jacob Howland is the dean of intellectual foundations at the University of Austin.