From the left: Confessions of a Token Black Prof

Explaining why he quit a tenure-track job at Bates College, The Atlantic’s Tyler Austin Harper slams the worst extremes of DEI and wokery as the senior faculty’s response to “rising discontent over student debt and tuition costs. For the academic aristocracy, touting fealty to Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, trans rights, and other progressive movements served as a convenient distraction from the intractable economic and social issues that the colleges themselves were perpetuating.” That is: “embracing social-justice rhetoric and adopting schemes to boost faculty diversity” were “cheaper” than “lowering tuition or hiring more tenure-track professors.” This “also helped nurture the delusion that elite college graduates were being prepared for lives of civic virtue,” though huge numbers “went on to jobs in tech, finance, or consulting.”

Science beat: To Root Out Fauci’s Rot

Anthony Fauci’s diaries “reveal a rot that goes deeper than any one official,” warns The Wall Street Journal’s Mike Fallagher. Our government science “institutions and funding mechanisms aren’t fit for 21st-century research and development,” as from White House official Michal Kratsios’ crucial new report explains. Kratsios’ reform agenda is “worth rallying around,” with a host of measures to “champion proposals that fail to win consensus support” and increase “collaboration and talent flows among academia, national laboratories and industry.” Heavy doses of “deregulation, new funding mechanisms and empowering individual scientists would curb the authority” of the “functionaries” who play “gate keepers of science.” “Shaking up the institutions that empowered Dr. Fauci would serve the country well.”

Culture critic: Art Museum Rejects Beauty

The new David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is brutalist “Soviet gray, all of it raw concrete,” thunders The Free Press’ Caitlin Flanagan, and the exhibits are worse: Under “museum abolition theory,” a lunatic opposition to “putting things in categories,” such as period, place or artist, art at the Geffen Galleries is “exhibited garage-sale style,” the “curatorial equivalent of a swap meet.” It’s just a “jumble,” a “a real-life TikTok, where the tiniest slices of things are briefly illuminated, disappear, and are replaced by something entirely different.” It is “not a place to learn”; worse: “The last thing the place wants is for you to be struck by beauty.”

Conservative: Dem Establishment Hugs Its Killers

Eager to return to power, Democrats like Sen. Chuck Schumer cover for lefty extremists, contends Jonathan Turley at Fox News. Yet, while “the establishment does not appear to care what these radicals represent for their party,” the radicals “care deeply about what the establishment represents.” Lefty agitator “David Hogg told establishment figures that the ‘big tent’ of his party is not big enough for them”; brocaster Hasan Piker “wants to purge” Democrats who don’t back Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, “calling them ‘haters’ who deserve to be punished.” Pols like Schumer may “use the ‘big tent’ narratives to brush off questions” about the extremists, but “once these candidates win,” Schumer & Co. will find the tent “not nearly as big as they think.”

Libertarian: Inside the Dem-Socialist Appeal

“The socialist surge is largely a project of young college graduates” who find themselves “credentialed but relatively low-income” because “the country’s universities crank out too many credentialed graduates, with student loan debt attached to not-so-useful degrees, to be absorbed into the prestigious positions they believe they’re entitled to,” argues Reason’s J.D. Tuccille. But they blame “capitalism, American and western civilization in general, and Israel and Jews.” Argh! “Free-market capitalism is good and contributes to liberty and prosperity while socialism does the opposite.” Today’s radicals combine “some of the worst ideas of the past — socialism, totalitarianism, and bigotry” into “the burnished turd of a modern political program for those disappointed with their lot in life.” Beware: These are “ridiculous, hateful, and have proven themselves dangerous time and again. Yet they continue to find an audience.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board