"Academics Spent Years Lending Their Institutional Credibility to Various Political Projects"

Now they are reputationally bankrupt. If they don't repair the damage, and convince people to keep writing the checks, many institutions will eventually be financially bankrupt as well.

Wise words from Megan McArdle (Washington Post). A bit more from the same column:

Academics need to sell the public on the value of their project. They must convince people that the radical pronouncements of the Great Awokening were a terrible mistake, now corrected, and that they are pursuing truth, not political agendas. Many people in academia do understand this, including the administrators who commissioned {the "Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences," commissioned by Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis}.

But many others are still clueless. Even if they grasp, dimly, that something is seriously amiss, they do not understand what it will take to fix the problem. Their idea of a solution is to imperiously inform Americans they are wrong: wrong that academia has let politics infect its work, wrong that reform is needed, and wrong that there are two sexes, male and female.