Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss was the eternal, unhinged, optimist, living in the best of all possible worlds. One might think Jon Haidt also a bit Panglossian: 

The good news is that the academy’s free fall is now over. American higher ed hit rock bottom on December 5, 2023 in that Congressional hearing room. Anyone who wants universities to bounce back and regain the trust of the American people must understand this new morality and ensure that it never holds sway on campus again.

“The academy’s free fall is now over?” Because several university presidents said the quiet part out loud and exposed their academic posteriors before Congress? Oh dear. 

Image: screenshot, CBS via youtube.

The academy--administrators, the DEI Stasi and faculty--are with few exceptions, woke addicts.  “Rock bottom” for them is far deeper and rockier than rock bottom for sane Americans.  Like addicts, many prefer to die rather than painfully claw their way back up to sanity and real reality. Others simply expire as their self-delusion consumes them.

Their greatest self-delusion is their own infallibility. The overwhelming majority of faculty and administrators on our self-imagined elite campuses are democrats/Socialists/Communists, heavy on the Socialist/Communist side. At Harvard, reportedly only about 2% of the faculty identify as conservative. Perhaps another few percent remain in the self-preservation closet, but suffice it to say these faculties seldom hear a discouraging word, and the skies are Marxist all day.

Such people know themselves to be morally and intellectual superior, therefore their beliefs and the policies spawned by those beliefs are perfect, beyond the limited understanding of inferior beings: Normal Americans. Because their policies are perfect, they are non-falsifiable. They cannot be proved wrong, and no evidence of their failure is possible. Because it is impossible, when their policies inevitably fail, that failure is ignored or blamed on others, when it is addressed at all.

The most recent example is Harvard’s response to the New York Post’s revelations of Harvard President Claudine Gay’s serial plagiarism. They claimed the plagiarism had already been investigated—it had not--and found not to be plagiarism, and hired a high-powered law firm to threaten the Post. That didn’t work out so well for Harvard as a few instances of plagiarism—“inadequate citation” as Harvard terms it—have now become a deluge, and so far Harvard is sticking to the “ignore it or blame others” self-imagined elite default strategy. Even if they eventually have to eject Gay, and there is some evidence they may be trying, they’re nowhere near rock bottom. They can’t even see if from where they’re standing.

The morally and intellectually superior, remember, cannot be wrong. Slightly mistaken, perhaps, but never wrong. Apology apologies are for lesser beings.

To regain the trust of the American people they’d have to admit everything they’ve ever believed, written, spoken and berated others about was wrong. They’d have to admit they owe innumerable people abject apologies for their smug condescension and cruel, even sadistic, abuse. They’d have to admit their writings and policies were and are wrong and destructive. Worse, they’d have to embrace the values of Normal Americans, the Deplorables they’ve so smugly dismissed and damaged for so long.

They would have to begin by firing Gay, which would be a tacit admission she was a DEI hire who should never have been hired in the first place, which is a tacit admission the entire DEI edifice is rotten and racist and must be dismantled. That’s a tacit admission their admission policies are also rotten and racist, the Supreme Court was right, and they have to stop trying to dance around the law to prop up their DEI delusions. And all of that might get them sued for discrimination. The apologies, lawsuits, and crumbling of every Socialist/Communist orthodoxy that is the basis of their academic and personal legitimacy would be endless. They’d have generations of moral and intellectual catching up to do.

Can they possibly admit America is a good, decent nation, populated by generous, kind and moral people? The horrible, systemically racist, evil, bane-of-the-earth pariah they’ve built careers on deconstructing? Can they admit the accomplishments of western civilization they’ve so long ridiculed and spat upon are the light and hope of mankind?  Can they admit the existence of God and their trespasses against Him and His creation?

They just might—gasp!—have to accept personal responsibility and work for a living.

Suuuuuure. That’s going to happen.

The lesson of 12-05-23 is at least some of the people in positions of power among the self-imagined academic elite can be made to feel something resembling shame or fear for a short time until the heat dies down. If one were cynically realistic, they might see that as nothing more than expedient, institutional ass-covering, a modern Panglossian ethic.

Mike McDaniel is a classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete and retired police officer and high school and college English teacher.  His home blog is statelymcdanielmanor.wordpress.com.