Academia today resembles the Inquisition. It’s loaded with people who are itching for any excuse to accuse others of heresy and then see that they are punished as severely as possible. The grounds have changed (from religious heterodoxy to social-justice heterodoxy) and the punishment has changed (from loss of life to loss of livelihood), but the mindset is just the same.
In this latest Minding the Campus essay, David Randall of the National Association of Scholars explains a recent instance involving a paper by a black professor, a response to it by a white journal editor, and the academic mob that is howling for blood. As Randall says, “Gangrene requires surgery,” and so much of the academic world, where an absolutist tribal mentality rules, is gangrenous.