In which Piers Ponders Institutional Collapse

Looking around, and I think especially in the wake of some deeply disappointing revelations about things that have happened at Carolina over the past two decades, I begin to wonder what institution, if any, can be trusted.  I know, I know . . . as I write that, I shake my head.  Of course no institution can be trusted completely.  When in human history have we been able to rely on the edifices we construct?  It seems to me, though, that the more "advanced" we get in terms of interconnectedness and dependence on large systems, the more vulnerable we are when those systems break.  From where I'm sitting, I cannot help but notice the following:


1.  My department has a crisis of leadership.
2.  My university has a crisis of leadership and direction.
3.  The state university system that employs me doesn't even pretend to treat its member institutions with equity.
4.  My alma mater, where I spent those eight wonderful years in graduate school, has taken a mortal blow that shows a hollow core.  It breaks my heart.
5.  My academic discipline is intellectually and institutionally adrift, and though the grandees at the top of the heap may blame state legislatures, etc., etc., the damage is almost entirely self-inflicted.
6.  The national and state governments have proven inept in almost every way possible (this last is the least surprising).
7.  Church leadership, both at local and denominational levels, has Macbethitis:  full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing.
8.  Knowledge industries like publishing and news:  hollowed out and collapsing.
9.  The education schools that turn out the teachers who are teaching my children:  F

For starters.  These are merely my observations, and I recognize that large-scale trends are always mitigated by individual examples of excellence.  I could name plenty in my discipline, and even in my academic department, who are doing brilliant and rigorous work.  They are generally, however, not the ones in charge.  I have always been a skeptic, though perhaps not a vociferous one.  I look around and see that I have been mistaken to abandon that posture, at least when it comes to trusting the big bureaucratic systems that appear to control more and more of my life.