On Wednesday, Minouche Shafik resigned as president of Columbia University. Her decision was long overdue. Shafik, an economist by training, proved unwilling or incapable of addressing the anti-Israel protests that engulfed Columbia this past academic year.

In this failure, Shafik clearly showed her unfitness for the office she held. Her administration permitted widespread disfunction and paralysis across campus that thwarted what should be Columbia’s main purpose: education. Classes were disrupted and students feared for their safety. Rather than take a strong approach early, the university let the protests and encampments overwhelm all order and peace.

Universities should foster free and open discussion. They can and should do so in a wide variety of forums, including the classroom, on-campus lectures from guest speakers, student-led groups, and other avenues. These free and open discussions should include pressing issues of the day, of which the current Middle East conflict certainly qualifies.

Yet all must be done peacefully and orderly. Part of a good education involves understanding how to live an orderly life in a community. It means knowing when and how to communicate ideas, including passionately held ones. It means respecting opposing views and understanding that the way you present yourself and your ideas affects how both are perceived.

These elements of education seem in too short of supply these days. We have made education for too many either simply training for a job or an adventure in self-fulfillment. But education ultimately is neither of these. Certainly one learns skills for work in these institutions. Certainly a good education can involve understanding oneself more and for the better.

But these goals come best through a hard process of understanding broader, fundamental matters. Education should explore what it means to be a human. This exploration should ask both what is universal to all human experience and what is particular to specific times and places. These investigations should not merely ask what was and is but what should be. What is our purpose in life? What is virtue, and how should one pursue it? How do we know justice and seek to live justly in our words and deeds?

Education also has a specific, political component. No, not chanting slogans for a faddish ideology. Instead, education should cultivate citizens who know their country’s principles, history, and institutions. For us, we must foster a civic education in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and in the great people who built and sustained our country under their guidance.

All of these elements of education seemed in woefully short supply at Columbia. Their absence was replaced by a miseducation that distorted rather than clarified, hid rather than revealed. We saw the fruits of this miseducation displaying themselves this past academic year.

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Shafik’s time as president of Columbia will go down as one of the shortest in the institution’s history. It also will go down as among the worst. Given the grand history of our Ivy League institutions, they should know better and do better. With three of their university presidents resigning over the past year, perhaps a wake-up call has gone out.

But don’t count on it. Instead, people should continue to think about alternatives for where they send their children, where they donate their money, and where they look for intellectual and moral leadership. The resources for a better way are found in our past. Does our present have the courage to renew education and, through it, help to restore our society?

Adam Carrington is an associate professor of politics at Hillsdale College.