Was it that long ago that we believed scientists were immune to the venal temptations and perverse incentives that lead lesser mortals astray? Ensconced in their ivory towers, protected from the vagaries of the market, their lives were thought to be guided by nothing but the pursuit of truth for the benefit of all mankind.

Why did we believe that encouraging politicians to pour hundreds of billions of dollars of our money into scientific research under the direction of career bureaucrats wasn’t going to have corrosive effects on this intellectual Eden?

In light of this, who thought academia should be self-policing, led by administrators ready, willing, and able to identify and root out malefactors that betrayed the public trust?

Such questions are coming to the fore again now that the Duke science fraud coverup is back in the news.

As if poor MIT President Spineless Sally Kornbluth doesn’t have enough to deal with as the only survivor of the disastrous Congressional “it depends on the context” elite college president auto-da-fé.

Sally’s doing her best to shuck and jive, keeping the world’s leading STEM university out of the crosshairs of the mean orange man, even as far-left faculty loons make her job harder. And now she has to mount another public relations campaign to save her butt?

The Beaver isn’t saying that DEI-based hiring and promotion is what brought us to this sorry juncture. As we all know, correlation is not causation. But next time MIT does a presidential search it might be nice to consider the kind of no-nonsense leadership we once had under stalwarts like Paul Gray.