The House hearing, the three university presidents, and the rot of post-American higher education on full display

 I've waited to weigh in on this, because there was assuredly going to be a first wave of reaction to the disgusting way presidents Claudine Gay of Harvard, Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, and Sally Kornbluth of MIT conducted themselves as they appeared before the House Education and Workforce Committee last Tuesday. And there was, from columnists, radio talk show hosts, cable-TV personalities and ordinary post-Americans conversing among themselves.

I probably don't have anything startlingly original to add to the discussion, but I know where on the landscape I want to position myself.

Let's start with the after-the-fact apology phenomenon. We see this a lot these days. The social climate in our country is such that there's not much regard for internal filters that might make someone think twice about taking a stance that allows one to indulge in self-congratulation, but that has a lot of opposition among people of influence. If President Gay's cocksure depends-on-the-context response to Representative Stefaniak's questioning about exhortations of Jewish genocide was one hundred percent sincere, then her walk-back has to be seen as full of ka-ka, does it not? 

Or is the reverse the case? There's at least a theoretical case to be made for that. After all, she was still dealing with the mid-November letter she received from 100 faculty members who did not at all care for the "Combating  Antisemitism" statement she issued in response to donors and alums speaking up about campus Jew-hatred. 

Either way, the only conclusion to be reached is that she's a phony.

And if these university presidents want to talk about context, we can gladly revisit the whole leftward drift of higher education over the past umpteen decades. We can trace the role of the Gramscian long march through the institutions by which 1960s radicals became tenured professors. We can point out the fact that William F. Buckley launched his career as an author with the 1952 tome God and Man at Yale, which examined his alma mater's complete secularization. Timothy Dwight, call your office.

I am also not the first to note that Gay, Magill and Kornbluth would have come down on similar calls for extermination of just about any demographic group other than Jews.

The "just about" qualifier was not thrown into the previous sentence idly. We all know which group would not incur their ire. 

And that's what this really comes down to, isn't it? A key component of the above-mentioned leftward drift is the assumption that there is something fundamentally problematic about being white. 

And there's a global dimension to this. Russia's Putin and China's Xi  are licking their chops at the prospect of a BRICS expansion that would bring its role as a voice for the "global south" into sharper focus. What an exquisitely effective way to nudge the West, and the United States in particular, out of their role as guarantor of the rules-based post-World War II international order.

So the ramifications of the way these three ladies conducted themselves last Tuesday are numerous.

It was one more confirmation that we've moved past the peak of human advancement and are descending back into the grim way human beings have treated each other for most of our species' history.