Penn President Liz Magill’s departure marks a critical step in the effort to rescue academia

“One down, two to go,” Rep. Elise Stefanik cheered of U. Penn President Liz Magill’s resignation.

If only it were that easy.

Yes, Harvard’s Claudine Gay and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth ought to follow Magill (and Scott Bok, who chaired Penn’s Board of Trustees) in quitting, after the three presidents’ disgraceful performance at last week’s House hearing on campus antisemitism.

But the problem’s not just these three, nor is it just antisemitism: The rot in US academia goes far, far deeper than that.

Most American university leaders would’ve done just as badly, and so would the default replacements for Magill & Co.

Because they all won their jobs precisely for the willful moral blindness that forced out Magill and may yet oust the other two.

Heck, Bok in marking Magill’s departure rationalized her performance: “Worn down by months of relentless external attacks,” he claimed, “she was not herself last Tuesday.” So she “provided a legalistic answer to a moral question, and that was wrong.” But it only “made for a dreadful 30-second sound bite in what was more than five hours of testimony.”

That is, she was tired, and so failed in a key moment to weasel her way out of telling the truth.

It’s the job of a modern college leader, you see, to wrap a warm haze over the hard left’s takeover of the campus, the faculty and the administration so the money keeps flowing in from the alumni and the feds so that the ideologues and the soulless place-servers can keep on feeding at the trough.

Oh, and ensuring that the next generation will steep even more in progressivism.

At most schools, the “stakeholders” have engineered things so that they control the Board of Trustees, too.

Every sick trend in higher education these last few decades is tied to this transformation: soaring tuition and insane administrative bloat; grade inflation and stark de facto racial administration quotas; the emphasis on luxurious dorms and the dumping of most classroom teaching onto grad-student serfs; the phasing-out of courses on the classics and the proliferation of “X-studies” departments; the rise of campus kangaroo courts and mob-rule assaults on faculty and outside speakers who challenge the reigning pieties. . .

It’s all about shutting out or shutting down the “trouble makers,” selecting new students primed to go with the flow and enriching and elevating every insider who goes along.

With the exception of a few schools like Purdue and the University of Chicago, the left has relentlessly “colonized” America’s campuses — and the winners of that enterprise now will fight ruthlessly and with zero regard for honesty to protect their privilege and power.

Including by invoking every sacred liberal principle they’ve been trashing to fend off any and all reform.

They’re already crying “free speech” (as all three presidents did at that hearing) to protect “pro-Palestine” rallies, never mind that the left has increasingly squelched campus speech it dislikes for decades now — with administrators mostly going along.

Next (if reform even gets that far) will come cries of “academic freedom” — for faculty who are the result of decades of quietly ideological hiring and tenure decisions that rewarded not excellence but conformity.

The main tool the outside world has to force change is the power of the purse: Starve these schools of funds (alumni giving, government largesse, tuition money) until they have boards and administrations dedicated to righting things.

Billionaire Harvard alum Bill Ackman had said there is “hope for UPenn” if Magill resigned, and maybe there now is.

But Magill simply goes back to her tenured law-school position; her replacement will likely be just another tool of the status quo — and even a fire-breathing reform president will be helpless without a board equally dedicated to undoing decades of rot.

And that’s just a single school, out of dozens of elite colleges and thousands overall.

We’re not even at the Boston Tea Party of this revolution; it’s a long, long way to Yorktown.