…for higher education reform speaks all too poignantly for itself:

A model of higher education that offered a prestigious degree, high admissions standards, a superb and rigorous education, a faculty that was truly and usefully intellectually pluralistic, and a climate of individual rights and responsibilities (joined with rights of voluntary association) would, I believe, sweep the field. No one can afford to build a great university to offer that model, however. For obvious structural and institutional reasons, no one is going to “seize” a major university … Until then, we only can work to protect the innocent, expose what the media are willing to expose, and await a generational shift in administrators and the professoriate. Such a shift … recedes ever further from view given the bigotry against intellectual difference and pluralism, the incentives for conformity, the disincentives for courage and independence of mind, and the willingness, indeed eagerness, of society to subsidize those who have contempt for the very culture and values that make both that subsidy and that tolerance of derision and condescension possible.

On a personal note, Kors adds:

The academic world that I entered is gone. I teach for my students, whom I love, and I fight for intellectual pluralism, for legal equality and for fairness simply because it is my duty to bear witness to the values I cherish, with no expectation of success.

I have known and greatly respected Kors for many years. Neither a tendentious optimist or pessimist, he valiantly strives for realism. His rueful vision here corresponds all too well to reality. “Sad,” as he says. Indeed.