WALL STREET JOURNAL: Bonfire Of The Academy: As liberal adults abdicate, the kids take charge on campus.

Behind the headlines was also a festering dispute between the school administration and graduate students over cutbacks to their health-care coverage. Student Jonathan Butler listed among the reasons for his hunger strike that “graduate students [were] being robbed of their health insurance.”

Less noted in the news coverage is that an August posting on the website of the university’s division of graduate studies explains in detail that the health-insurance cutbacks are the explicit result of the Affordable Care Act. ObamaCare’s regulations forbid employers, such as universities, from paying for their grad students’ health insurance. Another case of progressives eating their own.

So now the University of Missouri and its 35,000 students are leaderless. We can assume that the students who brought Missouri to this pass do not have a clue what comes next—unless one of them would like to step into the presidency and give it a fling. It would serve the faculty right, though not the tens of thousands of other students who want an education.

What was evident at the University of Missouri, and in last weekend’s confrontation over free speech at Yale, is that political dialogue on universities is disintegrating to the level of 1968, when many schools became places of physical and intellectual chaos.

The Missouri legislature — and, more generally, state legislatures, alumni, and trustees of all higher-education institutions — needs to take firm control to ensure that higher education institutions are tightly focused on administration. They can start by slashing administrative budgets, since “student life” administrators are usually involved in these debacles and serve no useful purpose for the most part anyway.