BOOLA BOONDOGGLE.

Ten years ago, Hallowe'en at Yale University got caught up in the Culture Wars.

[I]n John Hinderaker suggesting at Power Line that parents not let their children go to Yale is the strongest argument for rescuing the universities that are not hothouses.  It's simple, perhaps at the likes of Yale, and Wesleyan, and Oberlin, you find critical masses of coddled freakazoid spawn.  How dare that mean housemother Erika Christakis write "Toughen Up, Buttercup" in more words.

The hothouses have not distinguished themselves since, and twice Donald Trump has taken the presidency, and this time around he's taking the federal moneys away.

It's not that the poobahs of higher education haven't been warned.  That now old post, citing an even older essay, builds on criticisms of the Prestige Hierarchy of going on a hundred years, from people with bigger platforms than mine.  For the poobahs, though, the small disadvantages accumulate.

Higher education has had a series of E-T-T-S moments since then.  Scholarly standards are gone, and faculty control of the curriculum has been usurped by paid lackeys without character or knowledge.  That federal funding was always at the risk of nudging academic freedom for whatever governmental purposes the administrative state came up with.  If anything, the administrative state has been indulgent of its boffins.  "Tell me again, why do university administrators persist in biting the hands that feed them? A few years ago the fad was to hassle or seek to ban ROTC programs for not being properly appreciative of homosexuals, but that didn't stop the same administrators from crowing over their faculty's successes at getting NSF funding."  I posted that in 2003, concluding "Sanctions are not working. It is time for regime change."  At the time, Hillsdale had long opted out of the federal financial aid bureaucracy rather than submit to the affirmative action regime.  Meanwhile Harvard could toss ROTC off campus (the programs are back) and keep cashing those sponsored projects grants.

Until a day or two ago, and boy howdy are they unhappy in Cambridge about Our President taking the slush funds indirect cost returns away.  “No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”  The Hillsdales of this country have been having a lot of fun with Harvard's discomfiture.

Meanwhile, in New Haven, it's unlikely the people in charge are reading Cold Spring Shops.

Unfortunately, Columbia, and the higher education industry in general and the U.S. News-approved division in particular have been sticking rhetorical fingers in Normals' faces for years, and Normals might have voted for more Trump as a response.  "It came to this, dear reader, when sensitivity and harassment codes became business as usual. When you tear down all the fences to get at the devil, and the devil comes for you ..."

Not surprisingly, the sort of experts who write for the house organ of all wokeness, all the time, don't like it.  "The administration wants Columbia University to make sweeping changes to its discipline and admissions processes. Experts say the demands are overreaching."

But at Yale, well, maybe you try to stay above Harvard on that U.S. News pecking order by engaging in introspection.

A new president’s committee will attempt to discern the causes behind declining trust in higher education — and what universities can do to rebuild confidence. The committee of ten Yale professors will begin “a process of reckoning and reflection,” University President Maurie McInnis wrote in a Friday afternoon announcement.

To guide its work, the committee will ask for the perspectives of members of the Yale community, as well as a variety of “external experts” and “critics of higher education,” McInnis wrote to the News. Rather than requesting a report or specific outcome, she wrote, the committee will decide itself how to present its findings to McInnis.

A form on the committee’s website solicits comments from Yale affiliates and the general public. McInnis wrote that the group will also create some way for Yale community members to discuss this topic. Her announcement states that attempts to foster dialogue on campus may take place “in the classroom.”

Throughout the announcement, McInnis described the issue as concerning “public trust” in universities as they “come under attack in the public square,” and charged the committee with addressing “public perception.” She did not mention attacks from the federal government such as threats to revoke federal funding or rhetoric framing schools as liberal echo chambers, instead formulating the problem as a lack of confidence among the American people.

"Public trust" is a more general concept, and perhaps such things as bias response teams and culturally appropriate Hallowe'en costumes and the disaster that the Summer of Rage and the corona tyranny were for the reputation of the universities contributed to that "lack of confidence."  The new president appears to get that, at least in part.

McInnis wrote that as universities attempt to understand falling trust, they must “redouble commitments to academic freedom and free speech. At the same time, they cannot operate sealed off from the society in which they are embedded, and which they were established to serve.” She noted that universities must combat “self-censorship” on campus.

"Sealed off," though?  Recall, dear reader, an anecdote from a few years ago in which culture-studies heroine Rigoberta Menchu turned up scheduled to participate in a workshop at Southern Connecticut University, which is on the other side of the tracks from Yale, and when somebody at Yale got wind of it, supposedly nobody on the Yale side of the tracks had a 'phone number to call across town to work a visit by the lady to Yale into the day, let alone how to find Southern's campus?  That might be urban legend.  As far as combatting self-censorship, perhaps if the collegians can have a Hallowe'en in October without any preaching from Student Affairs or snowflakery from the students whose idea of fun is world revolution, that might do more than some faculty committee report to begin the work of rebuilding that public trust.