THOSE DEANLETS HAVE TO JUSTIFY THEIR EXISTENCE.

John "Grumpy Economist" Cochrane writes finis to his coverage of Harvard's latest administrative failure.  "I offer a few small comments on the Claudine Gay affair, and try to say a few things that haven’t been said many times before."  If you're at all familiar with Benjamin Ginsberg's Fall of the Faculty, what comes next will come as no surprise.

The source of higher education's troubles with administrators might be in the absence of intellectual foundations for a coherent defense of what higher education ought to be doing. When any social arrangement is a construction, it can be deconstructed, and the sub-plot that ought to make readers angriest is the one in which serial administrators serially bring in their own retinues of assistant-tos, facilitators, and consultants to replace the strategic plans and mission statements of the previous administrators, after much work by the previous assistant-tos, facilitators, and consultants that distracted the faculty from doing what faculty ought be doing, namely having original thoughts and challenging students and each other with those thoughts. (But, Professor Ginsberg argues, there are ample opportunities for administrators to play on faculty sympathies with underdogs by framing some of the usurpations as in the service of diversity or equity or inclusion or access. Why more observers haven't caught on that academic prestige rests in part on bad writing not getting published, or bad dissertations not being defended, or weak students not graduating, or -- keeping March Madness in mind -- bad teams getting a play-in game at best escapes me.)

That was twelve years ago. Here's how things roll at the Ivies and their peer institutions.

Faced with an existential challenge, a fork in the road between science and meritocracy vs. politics and activism, faced with plummeting support and public trust, the board and president think the way to “turn things around” is for the president “and her staff,” presumably abundant, to create a detailed “spring reset” plan, including “appear all over campus, hold office hours” and above all to “express her empathy,” and of course to appoint “task forces” to address “phobias.”

I quote twice just so you’ll stop and notice. It’s entirely focused inward. It’s marketing, spin, HR, with no fundamental institutional change.

Stanford has lots of these sort of events, “task forces” that sit around and gab and write memos, “community building” events. It also apparently has a lot of people with time on their hands to go to them. Noticeably absent: research-active faculty, assistant professors who want tenure, and grad students who want jobs.

It might have come to this, as I have complained repeatedly, because as long as the diversity deanlets and sociable schmoozers took stances that aligned with the belief systems of the professors, the professors were willing to abdicate their stewardship under the illusion that they were delegating work to functionaries, the better to be able to concentrate on that scholarship, until they found out that Student Affairs had captured the curriculum and usurped faculty governance itself.

How many times have I warned you about denying coherent beliefs, or pretending that logic and content are arbitrary constructs?  When the defrocked president of Harvard is reduced to the sort of motive-questioning you expect of ward-heeler politicians, is it not evident that all that strategizing, meeting, and retreating has destroyed the academic enterprise itself?

One of the lowest forms of rhetoric is to attack your opponent’s motivations, at least without evidence. Harvard’s critics do not self-identify as a campaign to “undermine” the search for “excellence, openness, independence, truth.” Indeed, if we listen to them at all, they say precisely the opposite — that their campaign is to rescue Harvard for “excellence, openness, independence, truth,” and to rescue the pillars of American society from the self-loathing cult that has taken over Harvard. They would say that Gay and company are the ones who have undermined those ideals. Maybe not, but “inclusive” rhetoric demands that we at least listen, focus on the facts of the matter at hand, and if we must insult people (“demagogue”) or attack their motivations, provide a shred of evidence to the world that does listen.

It's not as if hoi polloi haven't noticed, which might be why another dose of Trump is still in the works.

Outside the ivied walls of Harvard yard, a lot of people think that public health agencies and news organizations are crashing in credibility precisely because of their own evident politicized incompetence.

This is the level of knowledge of American politics and culture that one of the, supposedly, best minds of political science in a generation produces?

Perhaps once reality has come up to bat, sensible thinking will return.

Like everything else in life, “diversity” efforts face a budget constraint. There are only so many good smart candidates. (Yes, we need to fix the pipeline, but affirmative action promoters don’t say wait to fix the pipeline.) Had academia not really pulled hard to recruit her, she would have provided equally needed racial diversity in business. With her evident smarts, quantitative skills, hard work and administrative ability, she would now surely be a top executive at a major company. Where nobody cares about your research, even including a little plagiarism lite. Is the world really better off with one additional minority middling political scientist turned successful dean, and one less additional minority super-successful top executive at a major company? That’s a real cost, which we don’t often talk about.

The general view seems to be that many faculty at Harvard continue deep in the political cause. For example, most thought that her New York Times essay was splendid, not an embarrassingly hypocritical defensive piece written in anger as I see it. But a large number see the need for fundamental change, to return to meritocracy, science, and the classical values. Like, oh. “excellence, openness, independence, truth.”

Only after they've tried everything else?