A REQUIEM FOR THE FATAL CONCEIT.

In the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, in higher education, Brian Rosenberg laments a brief moment of common sense at Yale.  "Narrowing the mission of the university is an unfortunate choice."

Yale's faculty recently recognized that their industry, and particularly the fifty or so institutions claiming to be among the top twenty, had a credibility problem.

But one step the faculty took to seem more credible set Mr Rosenberg off.  Within the past ten years, the deanlets and deanlings did their usual meeting, retreating, and strategizing to heave up a pompous mission statement.

“Yale is committed to improving the world today and for future generations through outstanding research and scholarship, education, preservation, and practice. Yale educates aspiring leaders worldwide who serve all sectors of society. We carry out this mission through the free exchange of ideas in an ethical, interdependent, and diverse community of faculty, staff, students, and alumni.”

That gave way to a more realistic aspiration.  “Yale’s core mission is to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching.”  Maybe heaving up the likes of three of the past seven presidents and a big chunk of the federal judiciary didn't turn out so well, for the country or for the institution.

Mr Rosenberg doesn't see things that way.

Give Yale credit for chutzpah. It isn’t often that any organization, especially a nonprofit, chooses openly to abandon the mission of improving the world, which is the very basis of its claim to nonprofit, tax-favored status. The National Council of Nonprofits describes such organizations as ones that “provide a way for people to work together for the common good,” which sounds more than a little like improving the world. While I would never suggest that Yale should lose the benefits of its nonprofit status, it is worth asking why an organization that declares no responsibility to advance the public good should receive a public subsidy.

There is no such thing as the, singular noun, common good, and there has never been much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.  It's prudent, in fact, to run the other way whenever you hear somebody carrying on about improving the world, or building a better world.  That's the leper's bell of a vanguardist.

Mr Rosenberg comes close to recognizing that problem.  In "Absent a commitment to the public good and the open exchange of ideas conducted on an ethical foundation, a university might be indistinguishable from a pharmaceutical or technology company" substitute "political party" for "technology company" and you've pretty well captured how the Ivies provide court intellectuals for an increasingly discredited technocracy and an increasingly pathetic common culture.