A few months ago, I suggested on this site that college is making young people “stupider,” by which I really meant “more ignorant.” Too many of them graduate with fewer marketable skills than the average vocational school dropout, confidently “knowing” so many things that simply aren’t true, such as that men can give birth and that the United States is a racist country.

But what about the colleges themselves? Or, more specifically, the people who run them, the hordes of highly paid administrators from presidents on down? Have they gotten stupider, too? The short answer is “yes,” although in this case, I’m defining the word a bit differently.

I have long been fascinated by the theories of Carlo Cipolla, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1976, Cipolla wrote that “A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.” In other words, stupid people do stupid things for no good reason. They harm other people, and they don’t even get anything out of it. They might even harm themselves in the process—“shooting themselves in the foot,” as we sometimes say, or “cutting off their nose to spite their face.”

For those who cause harm to others for their own gain, Cipolla had a different label. He called them “bandits.” We are probably more accustomed to this type, or perhaps we just assume, logically, that most people who cause harm to others do so to benefit themselves. But Cipolla argued that this wasn’t always the case. Some people are just stupid. And stupid people, he said, are even more destructive than bandits.

According to Cipolla, stupidity is not restricted by class, education level, or even intelligence. Stupid people can be found in every profession and walk of life. As we all intuitively understand, there are plenty of stupid-smart people in the world. We deal with them every day, and they make life incredibly frustrating because there’s no logical explanation for the things they do. If someone knocks you down and takes your wallet, at least you know why they knocked you down. But someone who knocks you down and takes nothing—even at the risk of being punched or arrested—acts for reasons far less obvious.

University administrations harbor plenty of bandits, to be sure. They are the kind of people who make others’ lives miserable because they’re trying to make themselves look better, shuffle off responsibility, or move up the administrative ladder. But at least we sort of understand why they’re doing what they’re doing, and we can adjust accordingly. They’re somewhat predictable, in other words.

It’s the stupid administrators who, according to Cipolla, cause the most problems because they’re so unpredictable and irrational. They do things that cause great harm to students, the faculty, the institution, and maybe even the entire community, and ultimately don’t get anything out of it. They might even risk their own jobs.

For example, consider the administrators around the country who continue to push wokeism—embedding “diversity, equity, and inclusion” into the curriculum, promoting anti-Semitism, sponsoring drag shows, organizing segregated graduations—even when public opinion, and in some cases, the law, have turned against them. What do they hope to gain? Yes, I know many of them are true believers who are convinced that sentiment will eventually turn back in their favor, and maybe it will. But in the meantime, they risk damaging their institution’s reputation, losing state and federal funding, and even being fired or demoted, as some have been.

You’d think someone with a Ph.D. who rises to the level of dean would have, if not a moral compass, at least a stronger instinct for self-preservation.

There’s no question in my mind that wokeness, in all its forms, is incredibly damaging to individuals and institutions. We’ve seen a precipitous drop in the number of men attending college, perhaps because they’re tired of being told that they’re “toxic.” We’ve seen white students pressured to apologize for being white as well as for the actions of people who died 150 years before they were born. We’ve seen highly qualified white candidates for faculty positions passed over because they didn’t meet some “diversity” requirement. We’ve seen a systematic lowering of standards in almost every profession because of apparent racial discrepancies.

For what? What has all this accomplished? Not a thing. Or at least, nothing positive. Black students haven’t made any significant gains. Students in general have more debt and fewer employment prospects than at any time in the past. And the public’s faith in higher education—even if it has had some marginal gain—has basically fallen through the floor.

The people who run our institutions of higher learning have wrecked everything for no good reason, even at the risk of making the entire enterprise obsolete.

That is pretty much the definition of stupidity.

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