MANUFACTURING SCREWBALL IDEAS ON AN INDUSTRIAL SCALE.

Political scientist Robert Weissberg suggests higher education appears to have gone nuts because there's no institutional quality control any more.  He got the idea from Animal Planet.

Insight finally arrived when watching a TV documentary about Yellowstone Park. When the program focused on the wolves of Yellowstone, it all clicked—bad ideas that traditional plagued universities were kept in check by “wolves” who killed them off at conception, and when this wolf culture declined, nothing could stop students from hearing that an aversion to cultural Marxism constituted hate, and, furthermore, that this “hate” was tantamount to violence.

The wolf metaphor might not be the best. I submit that Douglas R. Hofstadter's anteater, while more whimsical, might be on point.  The anteater functioned as a "colony surgeon," gobbling up ill-formed formulations the anthill mind produced.  That's not so good for the ants that got into the wrong formation, or for the deer and the antelope that couldn't play.  But higher education has erred too far on the side of sentimentality.

Who are the campus equivalents of Yellowstone’s wolves? They are those smart, quick-witted professors who relish slicing and dicing mediocrities. They can sniff out ignorance and sloppy logic like the pack tracking lame elk. Their display of aggressive eradication is seldom pleasant since the aim is usually humiliation, not just correcting falsehoods. On the plus side, this mockery helps clear the marketplace of intellectual idiocy, and the threat of public shaming as an ignoramus undoubtedly crushes embryonic stupidities.

Yes, we're now supposed to be kinder and gentler.

A simple "wrong" might be "just fine," and yet even that is missing.

Clearly, as anybody familiar with today’s campus craziness must know, releasing a few dozen wolves on the campus would bring an intellectual blood bath—so many targets, so little time. And, rest assured, tales of these public humiliations would rapidly spread, and many students (and faculty) currently cowered by the PC crowd would take heart and, hopefully, likewise engage in some wolf-like predatory behavior. Once intimidated wolves would renounce their sheepskin camouflage and rip apart the idiots!

Academic wolves come in all ideological flavors, and a Left-leaning wolf is just as likely to surgically dismember a muddle-brained Marxist as a Canis lupus who worships Ann [c.q.] Rand. What counts is a target displaying inanity, sloppy thinking, and ignorance, not ideological disagreement. Indeed, a Marxist-inclined wolf might be particularly outraged when a student offers up some cliché-filled comic book version Marx. “All very enlightening but can you tell me, and others in the classroom, what sections of Das Kapital you have in mind when you insist that Marxism would reverse climate change?”

Indeed so. "Gentlemen, nothing that you learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life -- save only this -- that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education."

Professor Weissberg suggests the therapeutic university is too concerned with being called out for "hegemonic discourses" or all the other manifestations of phony oppression.

If Professor Wolf sarcastically challenged a prospective minority faculty hire over claims regarding the contemporary impact of slavery, it would be Professor Wolf who would be in trouble. His cutting remarks about these claims lacking any scientific validity since they were unfalsifiable would only bring embarrassed silence from colleagues.

Similarly, wolf-like classroom behavior would also be condemned for making students uncomfortable, silencing the marginal and otherwise failing to be 100% inclusive. This is especially likely since in today’s campus environment criticism of any “vulnerable” student is often construed as an attack on every vulnerable student which today means just about everyone. Thus, to ask a gay student to document that gays are currently treated in the US as Jews were under Hitler is tantamount attacking women, blacks, Hispanics, the inter-sex, the disabled and every other student who feels oppressed.

What’s a good wolf to do? Seek therapy? The answer is simple: they must be retrained and learn to attack new evils. After all, we can’t let the wolves starve. Using biting mockery and knack for demolishing lame arguments can now be re-deployed to discredit Charles Murray’s pseudo-science or ridicule fools who insist that there are biological differences in men and women. In a pinch, mock devout Christians but steer clear of Islam. Lots of safe targets and, rest assured, you will be venerated for your intellectual brilliance.

That might be, although that gives culture warriors outside the academy, plus Pajamas Media, plenty of stuff to undermine with mockery.  I suspect the professor is being hyperbolic to make a point.  I also suspect there's more at work, particularly with the tenured faculty being replaced with contingent workers, and with Student Affairs getting bigger budgets for indoctrination.  "In the all-administrative university we cheat students of a real, substantial education, the most deleterious consequence of which is the erosion of their ability to speak, think, and write seriously about themselves and their world."