THE SELF-DESTRUCTION OF HIGHER EDUCATION.

Robert Weissberg argues it was all with "the best of intentions."

Yes, some criticized the Diversity and Inclusion obsession and condemned identity politics. But, out of sight and on the sly, we contributed to the university’s intellectual decline. We made this disaster worse than what even the “woke” mob accomplished.

The adage “no good deed goes unpunished” captures this culpability. In a nutshell—and here I will speak only for myself and those I knew personally from the late 1960s onward—I am referring to lowering academic standards for black students and faculty in order to promote racial progress, a Weltanschauung in which the path to racial equality lay through education and, ultimately, the act of recruiting as many black students as possible and ensuring that they graduated.

Call attention to the affirmative action asterisk at your peril.  It's what went on in the faculty meetings, though, that did the real damage.

Much of what changed in my department of political science was obvious: more bureaucratic paperwork, additional departmental offerings on race and ethnicity, a neglecting of traditional political science subjects, and untold meetings that accomplished nothing. Less obvious was the extra time spent by faculty personally tutoring struggling minority students and recruiting affirmative-action candidates at professional meetings. It’s hard to estimate all the hours taken away from our teaching and research responsibilities as a result.

Almost nobody challenged the underlying logic of this make-the-numbers pathway. Everyone just knew that this was the route to equality and justice.

Nor was there any need for bureaucratic heavy-handedness or incentives. Everything was voluntary, and since I taught American politics, a favorite among black students and an obvious place to attract more minority faculty, I was at the forefront of the campaign. That our efforts might be injurious to racial progress or create cures worse than the disease was unthinkable. Even today, it’s difficult to accept that our good intentions helped undermine the university’s commitment to intellectual excellence.

That's incomplete. The administrative usurpations were with the sanction of the faculty, as faculty who were so sure of that shining path to equality and justice, were willing to have deanlets and deanlings handle all that paperwork.  "Unfortunately, the faculty has surrendered too much authority to administrators, including to trustees, often being complicit in the usurpation because it appears to be in the service of some Greater Goal, and that Greater Goal looks like a finger in the eyes of normal Americans."

The loss of the good of the intellect was a long time in coming, and now the bill is coming due.

In a few decades, what began as improvised, temporary measures to move the needle on racial progress hardened into the official academic culture. Trigger warnings and micro-aggressions existed long before they were officially codified. From freshmen to senior faculty, blacks on campus enjoyed intellectual diplomatic immunity.

Today, with scarcely any rejoinder, anything can be effortlessly explained by “white privilege.” Even to suggest that such arguments are unscientific invites accusations of racism. It is as if our past good intentions created people who now lack defenses against vigorous intellectual counter-arguments; if challenged, they respond with vitriol, threats of cancellation, or worse.

It's more accurate to note that treating idiocy as a form of intellect created a faith tradition, where, once, there was a semblance of engagement with ideas.

Academic life now resembles a monastery of One Truth and Only One Truth, and this Truth is sacred, an enterprise that innocuously began when the well-meaning efforts of well-intentioned professors like me decided to promote racial justice by lowering standards and avoiding anything that “might cause trouble.” Could matters have been different? Perhaps, but who had the courage to oppose affirmative action—the unchallenged dictum of the era—let alone to fail those special-admission inner-city kids trying to move up the economic ladder?

The enterprise might be, as Professor Weissberg suggests, beyond redemption.  On the other hand, a recent John "Grumpy Economist" Cochrane roundup of readings "in the self-destruction of American academia" might find the first stirrings of recovery: "[T]ake your country back, found institutions again."  There's a lot of irredeemable rot to be catalogued, all the same.  "When you are in the right, and the opposition is wrong, evil, racist, and so forth, and the world faces crisis after imagined crisis, we have no time for dissenting views and procedural niceties." Until Popular Opinion shifts, but you knew that.