Allysia Finley: Grade Inflation Produced Mamdani's Proletariat

I don't exactly buy this explanation, but it's floating around.

   More important, I think, is the package of loony theories and shitty, half-assed methods of reasoning that have ruled on the academic left for decades now. Students who major in pseudo-scholarly areas like gender studies and "social justice" whatever mainline the stuff. But anyone exposed to the humanities or social sciences or the twilight zone in between get some of it. So we end up with an intelligentsia--and a penumbra around it--indoctrinated with stupid ideas and taught to reason badly. And, of course, it's not a bunch of random bad ideas and bad reasoning: it's all leftist nonsense with some mangled Marxism at its core...which means: "the revolution."

   It's rather as if we'd allowed Scientology to take over universities. Some students have real majors and pay no attention to it, some major in "auditing" or "suppressive person"-ology...they end up stupider than when they went into college. But many students who don't become true believers just absorb a lot of it from the background.