I’m embarrassed to be an MIT alum and employee. Our president, in a recent testimony in front of congress, couldn’t manage to answer the question “is it ok to call for genocide on your campus?” without consulting attorneys and her colleagues at other institutions.

I’m not going to jump on the bandwagon of people calling for her to resign over this, nor will I criticize her late discovery of free speech. To be fair, while I find it disturbing that the “words are violence” crowd thinks threatening actual violence is speech when it’s against Jews, I can understand people supporting the idea that we should err on the side of tolerating free speech as much as possible, even if I don’t think it qualifies as such in this case. And certainly what’s happening in Gaza is unconscionable beyond any question of whether it’s justified.

That said, regardless of how you feel about Kornbluth’s answer, what she displayed was a lot of things but none of it was even remotely leadership. And that’s unequivocal.

When somebody asks you, as the leader of a university, a question about your academic policy, let alone a softball question like “you cool with calls for intifada against Jews?” you should be able to speak for yourself. You shouldn’t have to look over at Harvard to copy their homework, or consult with a team of lawyers about what you should say.

I suspect college and university would be a lot more affordable for Americans if we just outsourced college administration to a centralized management service. (Perhaps the DNC?) All college administrators think the same at this point and copy each other’s actions and policies, so why do we need to pay for more than one of each?

If we’re going to have zero intellectual diversity in academia, at least we could gain some economy of scale from it and get some relief for families struggling to pay for tuition at the same time universities increasingly struggle to justify their value proposition.