WHY ARE UNIVERSITIES SUCH HOTBEDS OF RACISM AND SEXUAL PREDATION? Inside Stanford Business School’s Spiraling Sex Scandal. “For the first time in his life, says Phills, who was one of the rare black professors at the business school when he arrived (and still rare, plus two or three, including Condoleezza Rice, when he left), he has felt the sting of racism, and at allegedly liberal Stanford, where bigotry seems bleached away by the perpetual California sunshine. At various points in their chats, Saloner—a Jew who fled apartheid South Africa rather than serve in its military—and Gruenfeld spoke of putting Phills in a cage and castrating him in public. Saloner relished seeing him in an orange jumpsuit in prison, and compared him to an elephant seal and a tarantula. To punish him and gain custody of their two mixed-race children, Phills charges, Gruenfeld reduced him—a man with three Harvard degrees, including a Ph.D. in organizational behavior—to the quintessential ‘angry black man.'”

Plus: “For Gruenfeld—who has been cited by Malcolm Gladwell; who tutored Sheryl Sandberg on gender issues (and sits on the board of Lean In, the nonprofit foundation connected to Sandberg’s best-selling book of the same name); and who sold her own book, Acting with Power, at auction last fall for nearly a million dollars—questions of credibility are equally crucial. How does it look for someone who built her career analyzing the abusiveness (she dubbed it ‘disinhibition’) of the powerful, and who, until a month before she became romantically entangled with the dean, was the G.S.B.’s sexual-harassment adviser, and who, as co-director of Stanford’s Executive Program for Women Leaders, counsels high-powered women on how to overcome gender stereotypes, to wind up secretly sleeping with her boss?”

Perhaps liberal academics think the rest of the world is this way because their world is this way.