José Cabranes: The Present Danger at our Leading Universities: What is to be Don [5:15-7:41]

Especially in elite institutions flush with cash. University leaders are all too happy to yield to students demands. After all, the creation of new offices and titles provides the simplest way to respond to constituent unrest. Is there a racial controversy on campus? Create still another diversity and inclusion committee or initiative. Our students protesting perceive failures in the sexual climate of the university. Expand the functions and the size of the Title IX office. Once embedded within the university, these insurgent bureaucrats return the favor to the students who invited them in. Through influence over academic evaluations and disciplinary processes, they shield student activists from the consequences of their own actions. Through anonymous leaks to student journalists who imagine themselves the new Woodward or Bernstein, they maintain controversy at a boil. And through influence over admissions decisions and a barrage of ever growing orientation programs, the insurgent non-faculty bureaucrats ensure a pipeline of new activists. Sometimes the new bureaucrats even promote activist causes directly. Consider, for instance, the astonishing jury verdict recently returned against a well-known Midwestan college and its vice president and dean of student life. This administrator was formerly the college's, I quote, special assistant to the president for diversity, equity and inclusion and total Title IX coordinator. She was found to have been directly involved in a student effort to liable and injure a local bakery on fabricated charges of racism. Seeking to escape liability, the college insisted that student activists acted without the college's imprimatur upon hearing the evidence the jury disagreed. It delivered a verdict of more than $40 million.