It’s simple. It was purchased with Arab money. Oh, Academia was primed for that sort of crap, since those beliefs are its default, but for a long time was some rough balance. Academia actually had a vibrant, if small conservative/libertarian presence. They also had brains, so their influence was out of proportion to their numbers.
But oceans of oil money began to flood the hallowed halls of our elite (and not so elite) institutions. It paid for endowed chairs for anti-American and anti-Israel professors. It paid for embedded Islamic Studies departments. It paid for university-affiliated NGOs carefully putting forth the pro-Islam/anti-West cant. And it paid for full-fare students from those oil-rich countries, plumping the coffers of these schools with cash that had a catch.
That catch was simple. Make Islam and the savage authoritarians in the Arab world objects of admiration rather than disgust.
Plus this from Melanie Philips: “The significance of these campus insurrections is far greater than support for Hamas or even murderous hatred of the Jewish world. The universities have become ground zero for the Muslim Brotherhood’s strategy of Islamising the west.”
Of course, any attempt to root out this malign foreign, anti-Western influence will be met by cries of “ISLAMOPHOBIA!” helpfully amplified by the universities.