Claudine Gay, Elizabeth Magill, and Sally Kornbluth didn’t turn up trying to sell Elise Stefanik a piece of the True Cross or an ampoule of San Gennaro’s blood, but they may as well have. They believe things—as their testimony and behaviour both before and since shows—that are vacuous nonsense, rooted in emotionally incontinent wibble. They’ve adopted a tendentious definition of racism that blinds people to injustices against any group seen as dominant. They’ve divided the world into simplistic categories of oppressors and oppressed, of whites and people of colour, of colonisers and colonised. They’ve concluded discrimination is justified on behalf of the marginalised. They think “my truth” can be substituted for “the truth.”

Worse, much of the worst drivel was developed by female and minority authors who, sadly, have been praised far above and beyond their actual talent by people who should know better in often mortifying cases of head-patting and humouring. Like Samuel Johnson, they think “a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” Unlike Johnson, they exalt all attempts—including risible ones—to the skies. This, in case it isn’t obvious, does not help women or minorities.

I don’t know what’s going to become of the universities—in the US or elsewhere, for that matter. We live in a world with much bigger, more powerful states and staggering wealth compared to that of Tudor England. We can afford more parasitic institutions. Henry VIII and Emperor Wuzong couldn’t. Whatever does happen will be messy.

[It’s a fascinating essay, well worth reading all the way through. Dale isn’t the first to suggest the analogy to Henry VIII and the dissolution of the monasteries as the solution to the corruption of Academia, and to note that the English monasteries had relatively larger endowments than the Poison Ivies. But England and China had something else, too — absolute monarchies that could execute such dissolutions. There’s simply no analogous mechanism at hand in our constitutional system for defenestration of Higher Ed institutions, especially private schools. But we can take the step of removing *all* federal funding for Higher Ed, including research grants, scholarships, and student loans. That would be a good start. — Ed]