Fast Takes: Confessions of a token black prof, root out Faucis rot and other commentary

Explaining why he quit a tenure-track job at Bates College, The Atlantic’s Tyler Austin Harper slams the worst extremes of DEI and wokery as the senior faculty’s response to “rising discontent over student debt and tuition costs.For the academic aristocracy, touting fealty to Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, trans rights, and other progressive movements served as a convenient distraction from the intractable economic and social issues that the colleges themselves were perpetuating.” That is: “embracing social-justice rhetoric and adopting schemes to boost faculty diversity” were “cheaper” than “lowering tuition or hiring more tenure-track professors.” This “also helped nurture the delusion that elite college graduates were being prepared for lives of civic virtue,” though huge numbers “went on to jobs in tech, finance, or consulting.”Anthony Fauci’s diaries “reveal a rot that goes deeper than any one official,” warns The Wall Street Journal’s Mike Fallagher.

Our government science “institutions and funding mechanisms aren’t fit for 21st-century research and development,” as from White House official Michal Kratsios’ crucial new report explains.Kratsios’ reform agenda is “worth rallying around,” with a host of measures to “champion proposals that fail to win consensus support” and increase “collaboration and talent flows among academia, national laboratories and industry.” Heavy doses of “deregulation, new funding mechanisms and empowering individual scientists would curb the authority” of the “functionaries” who play “gate keepers of science.” “Shaking up the institutions that empowered Dr.

Fauci would serve the country well.”The new David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is brutalist “Soviet gray, all of it raw concrete,” thunders The Free Press’ Caitlin Flanagan, and the exhibits are worse: Under “museum abolition theory,” a lunatic opposition to “putting thi...