HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: MARK BAUERLEIN: GANGING UP.

Amy Wax, professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania and contributor to our magazine, has angered her law school colleagues. The statement they have written appeared in The Daily Pennsylvanian under the title “Open letter to the University of Pennsylvania community.”

The opening reads,

We write to condemn recent statements our colleague Amy Wax, the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at Penn Law School, has made in popular media pieces.

The infinitive in this sentence is telling. Professor Wax has made some pointed remarks, but the 33 respondents don’t wish to disprove, dispute, or disagree with them. They condemn them. We know from the start, in other words, that we are not to witness an academic debate. The trial is over, the verdict is in. We are now in the sentencing phase. . . . If you read their brief statement in full—it’s only a few paragraphs long—you won’t find any disconfirming facts and exposures of invalidity. The authors of the letter don’t bother with refutation. The first and last aim is, as noted above, condemnation.

They don’t want to debate, because they know their ideas would lose. They want to silence their critics. Sometimes they succeed, but at the cost of looking both ridiculously self-important and childishly mean.

Honestly, if some evil genius of the right had invented a scheme to discredit academia, xe couldn’t have done better than academia has done itself.

And how ridiculous is it that half the faculty of an Ivy League law school couldn’t muster a single argument? Pretty damn ridiculous, but not, these days, especially surprising.