Spinelessness facilitated the left's march through institutions. The current retreat through those institutions has revealed some amazing newfound courage—from a safe distance.

When you can only stand up for what is right a comfortable distance from the fight, it is not a mea culpa; it's an admission of cowardice. I'm not fond of cowards.

Bestselling author, podcaster and public speaker Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer at The New Yorker for two decades and, before that, a reporter at the Washington Post. He’s precisely the type the media-academia complex considers top-flight when they bestow self-congratulatory awards, titles, and honorary degrees—of which he has a slew.

This week, Gladwell made headlines by admitting that trans activists once intimidated him into silence on a podcast about trans men in women’s sports. He now feels, years later, that this was a mistake. It was, but his career as a sage will, I am certain, continue uninterrupted. The progressive intelligentsia loves navel-gazers like Gladwell. Mea culpas, even weak ones well after the dust has settled, are resume builders.

Now that may play in New York City media circles, but from where I sit, Gladwell is a cur, and that’s disqualifying for me when it comes to taking him seriously. His mea culpa notwithstanding, he’s basically cut from the same cloth as the craven commentators who allowed honest skeptics of the COVID orthodoxy to be trashed by dimwitted mobs, subsequently revealed to have been taken in by politicized scientific dipshittery, who now all want pandemic amnesty.

Let’s just let bygones be bygones. Yessiree.

Spinelessness—and a lot of it—facilitated the left's decades-long march through government, the media, academia, and business. I have previously written here and here about the academic component of this from my perspective. Now that the rout is on, I’m noticing elements of the dumb and the feckless attempting to weasel their way back into relevance via mea culpa.

You knock yourselves out, but I’m not having any of it.

I wish that I were a better person; I really do. But at some point in your life, you’ve just got to learn to live with what you can’t rise above. That’s where I’m at. During the progressive march through institutions, I watched far too many academics, journalists, and scientists fail to stand up to things that they absolutely knew were wrong, sometimes catastrophically so, because they were afraid to do the right thing—often betraying their profession in the process. I’m in no mood to forget any of it. Especially since sometimes this betrayal was for as little as a pat on the head.

What I am in the mood for, if you will, is a short fable on the subject of academic cowardice for your edification. Any resemblance between the following and actual individuals or events is purely coincidental.

There once was an academic board at a small state university in the Intermountain West that included the president of the university, the provost, a couple of deans, two directors, several tenured faculty members, and one senior lecturer. The senior lecturer was deemed to be of such low status in the academy that his appointment was as a community member, rather than an academic member of the board.

One day, a newly hired director of affirmative action came into a meeting of this committee for a meet-and-greet. It did not go well. If you look up “Karen” in the dictionary, it’s her waving at you. It was all downhill after “My name is.’

In climbing and motorcycle racing, two extra-academic activities in which I have expended much blood, sweat and fear, there is an expression that is well understood by all at a visceral level—know your size.

Everyone thinks they can be the next Alex Honnold until they stand at the base of El Capitan looking up, or the next Valentino Rossi until they confront the first turn on a racetrack with 30 others trying to get through it at the same time. In these and many other endeavors, knowing your size is essential for more than a brief career. Academia is way over on the other side of this continuum. It’s yet another Dunning-Kruger bubble on full display in and around most ivory towers.

Karen did not know her size. After boasting about Ivy League credentials and progressive bona fides, she launched straight into an ill-informed diatribe along the lines of what many DEI types would assume to be true of a rural western community in which they'd spent about a day. The university, according to her, was known for racism (not). People of color had historically eschewed the community (true only if you excluded Blacks, Asians, and Native Americans). The entire place was a refuge for hillbillies and white supremacists (true only of the former and then only if you include your narrator, for a grand total of one individual).

Her deliverable was that she was the new sheriff in town sent to set things right. In a flourish that anticipated the film Tombstone by several years, hell was coming with her. First the faculty, students and staff of the U were getting religion, then the city, then the state, then anyplace in this quadrant of the galaxy that could profit from a dollop of progressive evangelism. It was something to behold just in terms of the sheer amount of arrogance.

Now one might reasonably assume that in a room full of people with the gravitas of a university president, a provost, a few deans and program directors—all six-figure salary types—someone would have politely demurred. You might be able to peddle that devil-went-down-to-Georgia shit to people who are compelled to listen as a condition of employment, but take one step off campus and see how far you get. The folks in town who work regular jobs tend to be resistant to progressive fever dreams that scold them for everything that’s wrong with the world.

You’d have, in fact, been dead wrong to assume that.

There was some polite, if uncomfortable, clapping, followed by people trying to exit the room as quickly as possible. Then, a laughing response from the far end of the table interrupted the exodus.

“You’re kidding, right? Who do you think you are? Whatever authority you have here in this room, and I won’t deny that’s a lot, vanishes the moment you step one foot off this campus. I dare you to deliver that same speech anywhere else in this community except the Unitarian Church. I know that the railroad folks won’t be impressed. Start there.”

Legend has it that numerous congratulations were given later that day at the faculty club. “You said what all of us were thinking!”

Oh yeah, then why didn’t you say it?

Rumor also has it that every unfortunate interaction that this faculty member had with a student for about the next three years was scrutinized by affirmative action as a potential violation of several dozen federal statutes. That’s the price one pays for standing alone. Principle isn’t a bulletproof vest. The glad-handers disappeared like sunshine in a Scottish winter each time this happened. Profiles in courage they were not.

That’s the moral of this story. If you know that something is wrong, and you have the professional standing to say something about it—indeed, often the obligation to say something about it—and you don’t, your credentials matter far less than the fact that you are ultimately useless. No cojones. Having seen how this works up close, you may take that tap-out shit somewhere else.

I can teach anyone to be an academic, a professional, a journalist, or a scientist; what I can’t teach is the self-respect, confidence, and moral clarity to stand up for what’s right, especially when the potential for commination is high.

It takes tough lessons outside of academia to develop courage. It’s a bit of an oversimplification, but I fear that when we replaced “Wait until your father gets home” with timeouts, and confronting bullies with safe spaces, we lost our ability to grow a pair. And we are worse off for it.

So no, I’m not in the mood for Covid amnesties or letting the likes of Gladwell off the hook. These pusillanimous twits let the likes of you, me and others trying to do the right thing twist in the wind when shit hit the fan while they hid. When they occasionally did find their voice, it was to label people who were speaking truth to power as conspiracy theorists, racists, and right-wing kooks. It was a progressive auto-da-fé. And it was to bolster the credentials that pad their sorry asses.

There’s just no way that a lot of people during wokeness, like Gladwell, weren’t aware that what they were saying was not only wrong, but a betrayal of the truth and anyone who stood for it. It was just safer and easier for them to hunker down and let others take the hit. Jobs, careers, and reputations ruined. For that, you may take your mea culpas and amnesties and park them where the sun doesn’t shine. It will be a cold day in hell before you get any quarter from me.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on X at @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.