The great essayist Theodore Dalrymple writes:
[The professor] left the university, which he had tried to serve faithfully. It was now a place in which saying what one did not believe was obligatory and saying what one did believe was forbidden, as has always been the case in any totalitarian country: and this in an institution supposedly dedicated to the search for and propagation of truth!
Before the professor left the university, the Department of Human Resources, already a horrible renaming of the Personnel Department (the humble issuer of employment contracts), had become the Department of People and Culture, a name that out-Orwells Orwell. One of its functions, presumably, was to prevent, sniff out, or punish thoughtcrime in the university and to eliminate culture as it was once conceived.
None of the above, alas, is in any way unexpected or unusual nowadays. On the contrary, it is the “new normal". The atmosphere of suspicion, fear, querulousness, lying, hypocrisy, pusillanimity, denunciation, and paranoia, all in the name of some vaguely defined justice, is now commonplace.
I do not recall ever having lived in so pervasive an atmosphere of untruth as that of the present. It is as if a demon of untruth had not merely insinuated itself into institutions but into men’s souls. The faculty of truth, like all other faculties, withers with disuse.