“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” — Jeremiah 17:9
The most important thing I have learned over the last several years is not political. It is not legal. It is not, in the final analysis, even personal.
It is anthropological. It is spiritual. It deals with the nature of humans.
I discovered that I had been operating with a theory of human nature that was, if not entirely wrong, at least dangerously incomplete. Like many people raised in the long shadow of the Enlightenment, I assumed that reason occupied the commanding heights of human affairs. Human beings, I believed, acquired principles, examined evidence, and arrived at conclusions. In that order.
I once assumed institutions operated much as science does. Errors would be corrected by evidence. Contradictions would be exposed by reason. Injustice, when it appeared, could be challenged by appealing to the very principles the institution professed to uphold.
A university, above all places, …
