In case campus life hasn’t already been atomized and fractured enough:

Nine college and university presidents gathered in Chicago over the weekend and decided to form a new organization that will promote the professional development of gay academics as well as work on education and advocacy issues.
The meeting was the first attempt to gather the growing number of out college presidents (25 were invited) — and participants said in interviews after the event that they wanted to encourage more gay academics to aspire to leadership positions and wanted to push higher education to include issues of sexual orientation when talking about diversity.
. . . “As the world evolves, we are going to have things to say on specific issues,” [said Charles Middleton, co-host of the meeting].

This represents just the latest confirmation that to speak of a “student body” has become an anachronism. College campuses have devolved to the point where youth and academics no longer gather to cohere into one scholarly fraternity, but to stand apart from one another, dumbly beating the drums of their preferred political, religious, and social interests.

While academics gather, preoccupied with pressing concerns about increasing gay academics in leadership positions and “things to say on specific issues”, students are getting lazier and curriculum is becoming baser.

Higher education will continue its hollowing out from within so long as academics continue to focus on the wrong things, like how to advance their friends’ presence in administrative posts rather than how to advance a curriculum that is crumbling.