Sullivan’s statement was a missive from the bureaucratic bowels of an accounting machine. It was surely manufactured by public relations specialists and lawyers whose interests are simply fiduciary, concerned only with legal liability and fundraising. There are no people, just “interests”; no judgments, just “initiatives”; no moral failures, just “issues.” There were, as one of my colleagues put it, no rapes, no victims, no women, no perpetrators—just “issues related to sexual misconduct.” And the only response is more policies, more initiatives, more accounting.

The captains of erudition are firmly at the helm at the modern American university. With their phalanx of managers, they are guiding us into seas of indistinction, into a future where the university is just another modern bureaucracy without ends, without purpose. And the faculty is asleep on the deck.