Penn’s Liz Magill labeled it “a context-dependent decision.” Harvard’s Claudine Gay said it “depends on the context.” MIT’s Sally Kornbluth
American academics suffered through their most depressing week since Donald Trump’s election — maybe even since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
On Wednesday, 67-year-old Anthony Polito murdered three people and wounded a fourth at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The job applicant passed over by UNLV affirmed the school’s decision by so violently objecting to it. The counterintuitive lesson drawn by many of his fellow professors was that the rest of society needed to become a gun-free zone just like UNLV. Hmmm.
On Tuesday, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges punted on a proposed rule to weigh the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts of a college or university as a condition of accreditation. This end-around on state laws in Texas and Florida limiting DEI ran into a defensive end faithfully fulfilling containment duties, i.e., a South unwilling to subsidize leftism disguised as an essential component of education as all other regions do.
The worst news at least for the public image of higher education came on Tuesday when the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT affirmed the oft-affirmed title of a book I wrote two decades ago called Intellectual Morons. Rep. Elise Stefanik asked what the university administrators seemed to regard as a trick question in whether calls for the extermination of Jews rose to a punishable offense on their campuses. Penn’s Liz Magill labeled it “a context-dependent decision.” Harvard’s Claudine Gay said it “depends on the context.” MIT’s Sally Kornbluth offered a “depending on the context” in her answer, too.
