THEY HAVE LEARNED NOTHING: Magill Defender Overseeing Search for Penn’s Next President: Julie Platt, interim chair of school’s board, expressed ‘full confidence’ in Magill amid anti-Semitism scandals.

NIALL FERGUSON: The Treason of the Intellectuals: Anyone who has a naive belief in the power of higher education to instill morality has not studied the history of German universities in the Third Reich.

In 1927 the French philosopher Julien Benda published La trahison des clercs—“The Treason of the Intellectuals”—which condemned the descent of European intellectuals into extreme nationalism and racism. By that point, although Benito Mussolini had been in power in Italy for five years, Adolf Hitler was still six years away from power in Germany and 13 years away from victory over France. But already Benda could see the pernicious role that many European academics were playing in politics.

Those who were meant to pursue the life of the mind, he wrote, had ushered in “the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds.” And those hatreds were already moving from the realm of the ideas into the realm of violence—with results that would be catastrophic for all of Europe.

A century later, American academia has gone in the opposite political direction—leftward instead of rightward—but has ended up in much the same place. The question is whether we—unlike the Germans—can do something about it.

We already are, as we strip higher education of its now-undeserved status. Next, the money.

JOEL KOTKIN: As antisemitism surges on the left, Jews are pushed to the right.

MATT TAIBBI: FOIA Exclusive: Did Pharma Companies Help Plan “Virality Project” Censorship Program? “This was the first concrete description we’d seen yet of “malinformation,” which the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) defined as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” In practice the definition would prove simpler: true, but inconvenient.”

Plus: “Government clearly has no legitimate interest in preventing people from building political coalitions just because those threaten to be effective. There’s also no legitimate reason a government-partnered/government-funded organization should be thinking at all about suppressing arguments against ‘government overreach.'”

DAVID MASTIO: DEI- indoctrinated students hate Israel not because it is different, but because it has so much in common with America.

IT’S COME TO THIS:

Fareed Zakaria's advice. The Ivy president debacle was so great progressives should retreat for now.https://t.co/KgzFeK07Jr

— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) December 11, 2023

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Joe Biden Wants to Kill Ukraine Funding And Blame the GOP For It.

LATEST HARVARD NEWS: Exclusive: Carol Swain Weighs In on Charge Harvard President Claudine Gay Plagiarized Her.

A SMALL SIGNIFIER, at Gold’s Gym.

OPEN THREAD: Enjoy!

THIS IS MOSTLY ABOUT TAX REVENUE: Ghana warns against illegal Starlink services. “Ghana is the latest country in Africa to warn against using Starlink before it issues licenses for SpaceX’s satellite broadband service. The National Communications Authority (NCA), Ghana’s telecoms regulator, cautioned the general public Dec. 7 against using services purported to be from Starlink following reports of equipment being sold and operated in the country. . . . Regulators in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Senegal have recently issued similar warnings to the public and Starlink resellers operating without permission.”

STONE AGE PIONEERS: Homo erectus’ High-Altitude Life 2 Million Years Ago.

FOR HEALTH AND LONGEVITY, EAT MORE MEAT:

Worldwide, bivariate correlation analyses revealed that meat intake is positively correlated with life expectancies. This relationship remained significant when influences of caloric intake, urbanization, obesity, education and carbohydrate crops were statistically controlled. Stepwise linear regression selected meat intake, not carbohydrate crops, as one of the significant predictors of life expectancy. In contrast, carbohydrate crops showed weak and negative correlation with life expectancy.

The science is settled. You don’t want to be a science-denier, do you?

HIGHLY RESISTANT TO GEN-Z CARJACKERS: 2024 BMW Z4 M40i Manual Transmission First Drive.

MAYBE ON AN AIRPLANE: Would You Trust Frangible Ammunition in Your EDC Gun?

THE GLOBAL BABY BUST: Tracking the Population Crisis.

MICHAEL WALSH: Make Like Henry: Dissolve the Ivy League.

But what if Henry was in part right, and that what Britain needed was the abolition of the institutional hotbeds of sedition and moral inversion that he considered Catholic monasteries to be? England and the United Kingdom went on to have some of their best innings as a nation after his reign, a winning streak that started in earnest with Good Queen Bess ended in the disaster of World War I, when German princelings resident in London fought German princelings resident in Berlin, who were fighting German princelings resident in St. Petersburg, and everybody lost.

What if we follow his lead, then, and abolish not the monasteries — the current incarnation of the post-Vatican II Catholic Church is taking care of that all by itself — but the Ivy League and a few other “elite” universities, the nests of “progressive” saboteurs who have inflicted incalculable damage on the United States since the arrival of the Frankfurt School on these shores just before World War II.

Surely, the stunning, clueless malfeasance of three female Ivy League presidents would indicate that a thorough housecleaning is in order. The ritual self-immolation of one of the most egregious offenders, Penn’s Liz McGill, was a good start, but let’s face it there’s lots more work to be done, boys and girls.

Calls to nationalize one industry or another have been coming from the Ivy League for most of a century. Turnabout is fair play! Not that this will ever happen, but it’s worth thinking about what to do with an industry now widely regarded as toxic.

Related: It’s Time for Congress to Open Harvard’s Books.

IT’S GOOD FOR THE PLANET: 4 east African countries are going for nuclear power—why this is a bad idea.

If climate change is as big a crisis as they say, the other considerations don’t matter. My advice: Finance it with Chinese loans, then stiff ’em.

WELL, GOOD: A shape-shifting robotic catheter could make heart surgery safer.

BRING BACK DDT: CDC issues health alert for potentially deadly Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.

“WE CAN BUILD A UNIVERSITY IN THREE YEARS, BUT IT TAKES THREE HUNDRED YEARS TO REBUILD A REPUTATION,” to paraphrase Admiral Cunningham. What happens to the presidents of Harvard and MIT, and what’s happened to the president of Penn, is small ball. The big news is the trashing of literally centuries-old reputations at institutions whose chief capital is reputational. Sure, they have big endowments, but that’s not where their clout comes from.

Bear that in mind.

JOSH BLACKMAN: The Rotten Core of College Campuses.

RIP: I see from Mike Williamson that David Drake has passed. I knew his health was failing, but I’m still sad and surprised.

If you haven’t read any of his books, you should. He did great work in everything from sword-and-sorcery to military hard SF. (Bumped).

POISON IVY: America’s Ivy Problem: “they’re just not being truthful about how they regulate speech on campuses.”

BACKLASH WORKS: Facing backlash, NYU Indigenous studies director condemns Hamas attack.