�One down, two to go,� Rep. Elise Stefanik cheered of U. Penn President
Liz Magill�s resignation.

If only it were that easy.

Yes, Harvard�s Claudine Gay and MIT�s Sally Kornbluth ought to follow
Magill (and Scott Bok, who chaired Penn�s Board of Trustees) in quitting,
after the three presidents� disgraceful performance at last week�s House
hearing on campus antisemitism.

But the problem�s not just these three, nor is it just antisemitism: The
rot in US academia goes far, far deeper than that.

Most American university leaders would�ve done just as badly, and so would
the default replacements for Magill & Co.

Because they all won their jobs precisely for the willful moral blindness
that forced out Magill and may yet oust the other two.

Heck, Bok in marking Magill�s departure rationalized her performance:
�Worn down by months of relentless external attacks,� he claimed, �she was
not herself last Tuesday.� So she �provided a legalistic answer to a moral
question, and that was wrong.� But it only �made for a dreadful 30-second
sound bite in what was more than five hours of testimony.�

That is, she was tired, and so failed in a key moment to weasel her way
out of telling the truth.

It�s the job of a modern college leader, you see, to wrap a warm haze over
the hard left�s takeover of the campus, the faculty and the administration
so the money keeps flowing in from the alumni and the feds so that the
ideologues and the soulless place-servers can keep on feeding at the
trough.

Oh, and ensuring that the next generation will steep even more in
progressivism.

At most schools, the �stakeholders� have engineered things so that they
control the Board of Trustees, too.

Every sick trend in higher education these last few decades is tied to
this transformation: soaring tuition and insane administrative bloat;
grade inflation and stark de facto racial administration quotas; the
emphasis on luxurious dorms and the dumping of most classroom teaching
onto grad-student serfs; the phasing-out of courses on the classics and
the proliferation of �X-studies� departments; the rise of campus kangaroo
courts and mob-rule assaults on faculty and outside speakers who challenge
the reigning pieties. . .

It�s all about shutting out or shutting down the �trouble makers,�
selecting new students primed to go with the flow and enriching and
elevating every insider who goes along.

With the exception of a few schools like Purdue and the University of
Chicago, the left has relentlessly �colonized� America�s campuses � and
the winners of that enterprise now will fight ruthlessly and with zero
regard for honesty to protect their privilege and power.

Including by invoking every sacred liberal principle they�ve been trashing
to fend off any and all reform.

They�re already crying �free speech� (as all three presidents did at that
hearing) to protect �pro-Palestine� rallies, never mind that the left has
increasingly squelched campus speech it dislikes for decades now � with
administrators mostly going along.

Next (if reform even gets that far) will come cries of �academic freedom�
� for faculty who are the result of decades of quietly ideological hiring
and tenure decisions that rewarded not excellence but conformity.

The main tool the outside world has to force change is the power of the
purse: Starve these schools of funds (alumni giving, government largesse,
tuition money) until they have boards and administrations dedicated to
righting things.

Billionaire Harvard alum Bill Ackman had said there is �hope for UPenn� if
Magill resigned, and maybe there now is.

But Magill simply goes back to her tenured law-school position; her
replacement will likely be just another tool of the status quo � and even
a fire-breathing reform president will be helpless without a board equally
dedicated to undoing decades of rot.

And that�s just a single school, out of dozens of elite colleges and
thousands overall.

We�re not even at the Boston Tea Party of this revolution; it�s a long,
long way to Yorktown.

Horace Mann
7 hours ago

Not bad, but still way too mealy-mouthed. The tax dollars that the gov't
gives to Penn -- $800M last year alone -- are not "largesse", i.e. too
much. It is 100% WASTE. So is the money that it gives, in probably less
big amounts, to Penn St, Temple, Harrisburg Jr. College, etc.

In case you weren't aware, the college itself grabs roughly HALF of every
research dollar that the gov't grants to a college. It uses that money for
such purposes as amortizing the mortgage on the laboratory/science
building (i.e. a profit center), paying for the chancellor's $1M salary
(i.e. HQ/admin expenses), wine-&-cheese socials (i.e. entertainment), etc.

We pay. They play.

https://nypost.com/2023/12/10/opinion/penn-prez-liz-magills-exit-is-just-
one-step-in-saving-academia/