THE WHOLE COLLEGIATE CAPRICE MIGHT JUST GO POOF.

I look like the moderate, placed alongside The American Conservative's Gilbert T. Sewall.

This year, soon, colleges and universities will need to borrow money to meet fixed costs, go begging to legislatures and alumni, cut staff, and postpone revenue outlays. What will become of the expansive diversity, inclusion and equity superstructures recently built into institutions? Therein lies higher education’s predicament. Despite cratering endowments and shrinking enrollments, these superstructures will fight at any cost and against institutional interests to remain campus bellwethers.

Since 2014, high-profile universities have created multi-million dollar appeasement packages to fight the forces of white privilege and fragility, bigotry, hate speech, and rape culture. Harvard College dean Rakesh Khurana declared “diversity of our student body” should be at the forefront of a “paradigm shift,” and with his allies, has worked for the last six years to make this happen. Yale has pledged $50 million to hire faculty of color and fund sensitivity training on racism and discrimination for the entire administration.

Reality, whether in the form of a novel coronavirus or a market test, has a steeper grading curve than the kind the Ivies provide to their clientele.

Throw a dart at the nuisances of the recent past. Will the ridiculous Critical Theory and Social Justice department at Occidental College survive? Will queer theorist Rei Terada, Professor of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine, get juicy lecture fees to discuss “Futures of Opacity: Anti-capitalism and Racialization in the Era of Real Subsumption”? Maybe not.

When austerity is essential, elected officials and trustees might review the wisdom of fueling diversity superstructures designed to crush or cancel Western civilization; sustaining a culture of grievance and recrimination; ensuring that advanced degrees, scarce jobs, impressive titles, and special funds go to designated minorities and women; protecting “vendor diversity”; and providing remedial education and therapy for mismatched students. Then there are the bureaucratic armies on and off campus who earn their keep, in the language of the University of California, overseeing “compliance with federal and state laws regarding discrimination, sexual harassment, sexual violence and retaliation, as well as the university’s affirmative action obligations as a federal contractor.”

Institutions have a choice. They can wisely parcel diminished resources or, beset by systemic rigidities and suicidal ideologies, bet on the bad, propelling identity payoffs and set asides at the expense of serious scholarship and what remains of academic integrity.

Indeed.

Mr Sewall concludes with his own version of "learn to code." " Fat-cat senior faculties can’t yet grasp that their me-first pensions and programs might end up on the wrong side of triage. Maybe it would be a good idea for some of them to learn how to mow campus lawns."  That's the one thing that troubles me about his skill as an observer.  It's notorious how squeamish faculty members are around power tools.