Minouche Shafik has quit as President of Columbia. After some posturing before a House committee on how Columbia “protects” its Jewish students from the pro-Hamas mob — which, like a virus, occasionally manifests a more virulent outbreak — Shafik showed herself incapable of handling vandals who interfered with student access to classes, damaged school property, and threatened Jewish students. Of course, she didn’t get the boot right away. No, following a decent interval after the spring semester and before the fall term resumes, she disappeared.

One can only hope the House schedules hearings with the leadership of, say, all the Ivies and other top universities; academe’s Augean stables could use a thorough cleaning. After the infamous Claudine Gay/Liz Magill/Sally Kornbluth testimony last December 5, the House record is 3 for 4 in eliminating academic ballast.

When I heard Minouche Shafik resigned, however, my first reaction was not like National Review’s: “good riddance!” It was: “she’ll land well.” Don’t expect to find Dr. Shafik on Broadway and West 120^th panhandling with a paper cup. The global elites take care of their own. Shafik’s gone from Oxford to the World Bank to the London School of Economics to Columbia; being in that club means never having to say you’re wrong. “Mistakes,” maybe. Wrong, never. By the way, USA Today reported (Aug. 16) she’ll probably find a nice sinecure in England’s new Labour government. Maybe she’ll find her voice in denouncing “right wing extremism.”

Conservatives love to speak of the liberal takeover of academe as the “long march through the institutions.” But they should pay attention to that phrase, coined by a German socialist, Rudi Dutschke. In der lange Marsch durch die Institutionen, “institutions” is plural. The ideological capture of the institutions is not just about education. It is about all the levers of power in a society. We see that in the current kowtow of corporate America to the latest woke dogmas.

The conservative hounded out of academe for “misgendering” has to find some group to defend him. The liberal who tanks a profitable beer brand’s stock because of his/her “gendering“ gets new gigs. Those folks more committed to their ideologies than their nation’s real interests generally protect each other. Indeed, they play bait-and-switch, identifying their ideological interests with “democracy,” “rule of law,” “European values,” and whatever is needed to keep their fingers tightly on the gears of power. And that’s true of the Left and the Right. Consider the behind-the-scenes struggle afoot over the Republican Party’s future.

The same day National Review bid Shafik “good riddance,” they also undertook criticism of Vice Presidential nominee J.D. Vance for wanting to mandate two-person minimum crews on trains (see article here). What’s the connection between Shafik and the critics of two-man train crews? A common economic vision that prioritizes capital over labor (contrary to Laborem exercens, #12, here) which, in the end, hangs workers out to dry. (It’s also a prioritization globalists generally don’t apply to themselves.)

The worshippers of Adam Smith at the Altar of the Invisible Hand see no reason to think that a two-man crew is qualitatively different from a one-man crew. They’d like, in fact, to treat the one man as simply a kind of emergency brake in case automation fails. In their world view, trains, planes, and automobiles would be so much more “efficient” if automated, allowing the sacred market to impose “efficiencies” that are supposedly hampered by the presence of a second human being, which they write off to mere union advocacy.

Well, I don’t want to ride in an automated train, plane, or automobile, and while these votaries of the laissez-faire market will prate about how much it has to do with “choice,” let’s be honest: when all questions are reduced to purely economic calculus, the cheapest way wins and there is no other choice. That some human beings might be hurt along the way is the price of “doing business.”

As in Dr. Shafik’s case, however, those who make these decisions rarely suffer their consequences. Worst case, they might have to resign, but there’ll be another slot somewhere, or at least a golden parachute for a soft landing. The economic geniuses that decided America didn’t need manufacturing jobs, which could be “efficiently” offshored to East Asia, didn’t suffer; they still collect profits on jeans from Vietnam. The people who suffered are the workers in Georgia they displaced, who cannot now afford jeans because they don’t have a job.

From the 1980s through the 2010s, those economic conservatives bleated about “free trade.” Yes, some of them even added “fair trade” (always sotto voce) but, after rhetorically checking that box, they never did anything to actually verify that the trade was fair. And they’re incensed that Donald Trump bared their scam by making clear it wasn’t.

The fundamental split in this year’s election is between continuing on-course with the Biden-Harris-Walz economic disaster or “going backwards” to the prosperity that marked the Trump Administration. But make no mistake: there’s a second split here, one that remains a fight for the soul of the Republican Party. Will it be a party of the working and middle classes, forging a new coalition of those who are invested in America by the sweat of their brows rather than their stock options? Or will it continue to be a party of the seventh floor board room, happy to share cocktails and canapés with Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton as they tell coal miners to “learn to code”?

As for me, I believe a human being (and his job) is more than just a figure on a balance sheet.