Ivory Tower - University presidents have lost their dignity

Victor Davis Hanson dissects the presidents of some prestigious universities. Click on the link to read the whole thing.

Whether or not you agreed with them, university presidents used to be dignified
figures on the American scene. They often were distinguished scholars, capable
of bringing their own brand of independent thinking to bear on the operation and
reform of their institutions. Above all, they took seriously the university's
mission to seek and transmit the Truth, and thereby to strengthen the free
society that made such inquiry possible.
But it has been a long time since
Woodrow Wilson (at Princeton), Robert Hutchins (at Chicago) or James Bryant
Conant (at Harvard) set the tone for American campuses. Over the past year, four
university presidents have been in the news--from Harvard; the University of
California, Santa Cruz; the University of Colorado; and the University of
California, Berkeley. In each case, the curtains have briefly parted, allowing
the public to glimpse the campus wizards working the levers behind the scenes,
and confirming that something has gone terribly wrong at our best public and
private universities.
Hypocrisy, faddishness, arrogance and intellectual
cowardice are among the ailments of the American university today, and it is
hard to say whether even a great president could save higher education from its
now institutionalized vices. Amid the variety of scandals afflicting the
campuses, the one constant is how the rhetoric of "diversity" trumps almost all
other considerations--and how race and gender can be manipulated by either the
college president or the faculty in ways that have nothing to do with educating
America's youth, but everything to do with personal aggrandizement in an
increasingly archaic and unexamined enclave

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