THE LIGHT BULB HAS TO WANT TO CHANGE.

That's a punch line that might say more about academic psychology than the casual teller might suspect.

It's also an observation germane to how higher education might get around to clearing out the cancel mobs.  The latest atrocity involves a Chicago astrophysicist whose colleagues at THE MASSACHVSETTS INTITVTE OF TECHNOLOGY invited to give a major guest talk about astrophysics, only to withdraw the invitation because that astrophysicist had reasonable doubts about the latest diversity, inclusion, and equity fads.

Let the soul-searching begin.  Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan called attention to a particularly foolish quote a Williams professor of geosciences offered to one of the coastal house organs of Morale Conditioning. "This idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of intellectualism comes from a world in which white men dominated."  "Absolutely best quote so far," she writes, and that's not meant in a good way.  A commenter expands.  "These are the unspoken, unchallenged assumptions underlying so much of these cancelleations, and they are simply infantilizing, even dehumanizing, of Black people."

Those developments are salutary, as University Diaries are the observations of a retired professor of English, with a concentration, as far as I can tell, in analysis of poetry, which is to say, not the sort of potted political economy that has destroyed much of the humanities, and many of her regular commenters are people who share most of the traditional stances of higher ed types.  That is to say, when University Diaries calls attention to the excesses of the cancel mob, and the cancel mob doesn't turn up in the comments, but other dismayed academicians do, dismayed, that is, at the woke weirdness, perhaps there remains a possibility of higher education reclaimed.

Reason's Robby Soave might be praying that the reclamation begins.  "It should be obvious that no place of healthy and open inquiry could thrive under such rigid ideological requirements."  Hot Air's John Sexton is having fun, as you might expect, with the freak flags flying, concluding, "My point here is that we may have a problem when the readers of the NY Times (not a right wing outlet last time I checked) make infinitely more sense than some of the professors at elite colleges. MIT should be ashamed for its decision."