The presidents of three Ivy League universities testified before Congress last week in a hearing that quickly became a testament to the intellectual and moral rot that has taken hold of their institutions. At least one of the witnesses, Penn’s Liz Magill, has since been forced to resign from her position as the university’s president, and Harvard President Claudine Gay appears to be on her way out as well.

Their fault was failing to explain adequately whether antisemitic rhetoric, including an outright call for the genocide of Jews, violates their schools’ conduct codes. Magill, Gay, and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth repeatedly insisted that such rhetoric is “context-dependent” and that the schools’ supposed commitment to the First Amendment and free expression would have to inform any disciplinary action.

In response, many on the Left and even some on the Right have argued the presidents’ answers were poorly communicated but legally accurate. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, for example, argued that universities are right not to ban speech calling for the death of Jews, warning that any carve-out to free speech rights could eventually be used against conservatives.

In City Journal, Heather Mac Donald agreed :

The problem here is that Magill, Gay, and Kornbluth were not asked whether genocide advocacy is protected by the First Amendment but whether it violated their codes of conduct governing student and faculty behavior on campus. To be sure, conduct codes should and usually do reflect constitutional principles, since those principles are the bedrock of our society and help establish not only our rights but our responsibilities to each other. However, these codes are necessarily limited and sometimes stringent. They can regulate students’ dress codes, living arrangements, and, yes, their speech.

There’s a good reason for this. Universities are not government bodies but academic institutions tasked with educating and forming the character of the students entrusted to them. It is this role that free speech absolutists (and the bandwagoning leftists who have suddenly rediscovered the First Amendment now that their agenda has gone awry) seem eager to forget.

Of course, colleges have a vested interest in academic inquiry and open debate on campus. But they also have a vested interest in making sure that their students enter society and the leadership roles that will be handed to them as responsible citizens. Students calling for the annihilation of an entire people-group clearly do not meet that standard and must therefore be regulated.

As the president of my alma mater, Hillsdale College, put it, there’s more to education than free speech. “A college’s purpose isn’t merely to encourage speech,” Larry Arnn wrote in the Wall Street Journal a couple of months ago. “A college’s purpose, through speaking and thinking — the two go together — is to teach students to think and speak better in search of knowledge.”

Ironically, Arnn was responding to criticism by FIRE that Hillsdale’s policies “clearly and consistently state that it prioritizes other values over a commitment to freedom of speech.” But his statement holds true here, as well. Colleges are not open, public squares that must allow any and all kinds of speech. They are institutions with specific missions and stated values, and it is their responsibility to instill those values in their students through classroom learning and also by governing their conduct.

And that’s exactly what Penn, Harvard, MIT, and the rest of the higher education establishment have been doing — except in this case, the values they’re instilling are a part of a noxious, left-wing ideology that encourages students to embrace antisemitism and terrorism for the sake of diversity, equity, and inclusion. That’s why Magill, Gay, and Kornbluth could not say whether genocidal rhetoric against the Jews violates their schools’ conduct codes — because it doesn’t.

Only when we are willing to recognize the depth of this moral rot will we be able to address and reform the problems within higher education in America. More free speech cannot compensate for the fact that the institutions responsible for shaping the next generation of leaders are instead mass-producing bigoted bullies bent on destroying everyone and everything in their path. And indeed, more speech, in this case, might even embolden them to a greater degree.