TRUTH IS NOT A TEAM SPORT.

Radiologist Scott Atlas suggests the future of higher education might not be so bright, in part because "consensus" and "collegiality" have crowded out scholarly inquiry.

Why, at this moment in history, is it particularly important to consider how America’s institutions—here, colleges and universities—should be reformed, or whether they can even be reformed?

After all, for decades we have been aware that our institutions were failing: editorialized, dishonest journalism; wasteful, corrupt government; and colleges and universities increasingly abandoning their essential purpose of fostering the free exchange of ideas and critical thinking in favor of agenda-driven social advocacy, particularly advocacy unbalanced toward the left.

It's not that nobody noticed.

Dr Atlas's speech, understandably, focuses on the ad popularum fallacy that became "scientific consensus" to justify the irresponsible corona tyranny.

In my own recent reading and rereading, trying to understand what is happening in our country and in human nature, besides Dostoevsky, Kafka, Tolstoy, and Orwell, it was Alexis de Tocqueville who surprised me. Nearly 200 years ago in Democracy in America, he detailed his admiration for the extraordinary new nation of America, founded on unprecedented self-governance and personal freedom.

Yet, amidst all his praise, Tocqueville wrote that despite laws protecting against physical persecution or censorship by the state:

“I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America. In America, the majority raises very formidable barriers to the liberty of opinion. Within these barriers, an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them. He is exposed to continued obloquy and persecution. Every sort of compensation is refused to him. Before making public his opinions, he thought he had sympathizers; now, it seems to him that he has none anymore. Those who blame him criticize loudly, and those who think as he does keep quiet and move away, without courage.”

Why is understanding this so essential to university reform?

Because universities and professors are granted privileged positions of leadership in our society. Professors are automatically, by virtue of their titles, deemed leaders and experts by the public. They are selected as key advisers to heads of government and as directors of government agencies. They are the media’s sources of expertise. They are highly respected and considered leaders.

More than that, America’s universities are supposed to be the centers of the free exchange of ideas, aren’t they?

In that role, university professors are entrusted to facilitate that exchange, to teach critical thinking to our children, and to serve as role models for civil discourse. That special respect, that trust, demands a very serious obligation on the part of university professors and leaders to meet the standard that deserves such trust.

During the pandemic, university presidents and professors, falsely clothed by their titles, reminiscent of the Emperor’s, were exposed as lacking what it takes to be leaders.

University presidents and professors broke the social contract with our most precious resource, our children, harming them directly. But they also failed as role models for free speech, and now, as a nation, the free exchange of ideas is under threat. Free speech—the bedrock principle of free societies—is perhaps especially important on campus, where it is modeled for our nation’s future leaders.

Consider their response to those challenging the narrative and questioning their decisions to lock down schools, to force testing and quarantining of asymptomatic healthy students, and to require injection with an experimental vaccine for an illness from which healthy students had no serious risk. What was the response to speaking the truth at so-called “elite” universities, including my own employer, Stanford?

Censorship: character assassination and intimidation. I proudly stand as the only faculty member to receive a formal censure from the faculty senate.

The corona tyranny, the summer of rage, and the subsequent sucking up to jihadis exposed the institutional dry rot at the most sacred of institutions: the Centers for Disease Control, Stanford, and the Ivies.  It was a long time coming, and for the simplest of reasons.  "I think that the game that at one time worked to elevate brilliant scholars has been thoroughly gamed by midwits. The result is a system that places a premium on conformity."

Arnold Kling, who posted that, opted out, or was shut out, of the midwittery years ago.  "Higher" education, whether at the regional comprehensives or at the Ivies, came to be inhabited by the midwits.

The academic fads that survive are those that any midwit can participate in. The sort of intellectually gifted, independent-minded scholar that could attain a prestigious professorship at a university in 1950 would be weeded out by the current system by the time such an individual could finish a postgraduate degree and apply for a faculty position, if not sooner.

I do not think that the system will be fixed by somehow seeding academia with a better philosophical framework. I am afraid that you have to blow it up and start over.

That might be, and perhaps rediscovering that consensus for its own sake turns out badly.  "Bet on emergence, not on the wisdom of philosopher-kings whether elected to office or tenured at colleges you might have heard of."