KURT SCHLICHTER: Academia Needs to Go Extinct. “Crises clarify what is true, and what is indisputably true during this crisis is that academia, as currently constituted, is a poisonous cancer infecting our society. Like many other institutions, academia has gone from respect to contempt in the eyes of normal people, if not our garbage ruling class. But its latest series of public disgraces may wake up even the most obstinate cheerleaders for pretending that nothing fundamental has changed.”

Plus:

But there was another aspect to this, one that is even more likely to change minds and hearts in the direction of reality. It is the realization by the people with an antiquated view of the universities that their kids are likely to never see the inside of a big name campus. Oh, the very richest kids’ spawn will. They will have no problem getting into the Harvards and Yales because daddy has $1 billion and just paid for the new wing of the Social Justice and Decolonization Department building. But regular folks, whose children aren’t able to check multiple boxes on the intersectionality form are out of luck. The big lie is that if you work hard enough and show merit, your kid can get in too. But your kid can’t. These are exclusive clubs, and your kid better stay outside the velvet rope because your kid is not on the VIP list.

Everyone recently saw that story of the A+ graduate with near perfect SATs who actually started his own company, and yet couldn’t get admitted into any of the top universities. He made the mistake of being Asian, which is a mistake on par with being some white kid from the suburbs. The colleges have decreed, and the awful wine women inhabiting their admissions departments concur, that if you were those things you don’t get a shot. Merit is dead for the designated undiverse. And when people realize that their kids are out of luck if they don’t have some bizarre gender identity or something else that makes them thrill the hearts of the Chardonnay-swillers who pick and choose the Ivy student bodies, these voters are going to say “Oh, hell no!” next time they are asked to subsidize academia both with tax money and respect.

We need a higher education sector that Looks Like America.