Political Observer offers some selective quotation of Stephen’s moralizing politics.

Bret Stephens when he isn’t proclaiming his moral uprightness and virtue, he can’t resist the temptation to attack the Civil Rights Era and The Great Society of Johnson, on its periphery. The Left in the political imagination of Stephens is about that time, place , it politics , its imperatives and its political/legal evolution.

Here is a selection from Stephens essay of Jan. 2, 2024 that demonstrates his own set of imperatives . Stephens’s self-concept is about being a Political Moralist!

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The answer, I think, is this: Where there used to be a pinnacle, there’s now a crater. It was created when the social-justice model of higher education, currently centered on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — and heavily invested in the administrative side of the university — blew up the excellence model, centered on the ideal of intellectual merit and chiefly concerned with knowledge, discovery and the free and vigorous contest of ideas.

Why did that change happen? I’ve seen arguments that it goes back to the 1978 Bakke decision, when the Supreme Court effectively greenlit affirmative action in the name of diversity.

But the problem with Bakke isn’t that it allowed diversity to be a consideration in admissions decisions. It’s that university administrators turned an allowance into a requirement, so a kind of racial gerrymander now permeates nearly every aspect of academic life, from admissions decisions to faculty appointments to the racial makeup of contributors to essay collections. If affirmative action had been administered with a lighter hand — more nudge than mandate — it might have survived the court’s scrutiny last year. Instead, it became a pervasive regime that frequently got in the way of the universities’ higher goals, particularly the open exchange of ideas.

This is the poisoned pool in which Harvard now swims.

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That respect is now being eroded to the point of being erased. For good reason. People admire, and will strive for, excellence — both for its own sake and for the status it confers. But status without excellence is a rapidly wasting asset, especially when it comes with an exorbitant price. That’s the position of much of American academia today. Two-hundred thousand dollars or more is a lot to pay for lessons in how to be an anti-racist.

Nobody should doubt that there is still a lot of excellence in today’s academia and plenty of good reasons to send your kids to college. But nobody should doubt, either, that the intellectual rot is pervasive and won’t stop spreading until universities return to the idea that their central purpose is to identify and nurture and liberate the best minds, not to engineer social utopias.

Political Observer