Mark Bauerlein explains the dichotomy in his Federalist article With Anti-Woke College Trustee Picks, DeSantis Chips Away At The Political Poison In Education.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Something remarkable happened in fifth-century Athens when Socrates set up shop, conversed freely on the things of this world, and followed the truth wherever it would lead. It also happened in 1609 when University of Padua professor Galileo Galilei pointed his telescope at the moon and found that the heavenly orb wasn’t as pure and smooth as everyone said. It happened in America as well when in 1940, the American Association of University Professors issued its “Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure,” which hailed “the free search for truth and its free exposition.”

However, no group has been less tolerant of dissent than the academic left, neither Christian fundamentalists nor corporate donors who like to see their names on business school buildings. But it is one notable triumph of the left to have pushed certain obvious threats to open inquiry while at the same time persuading centrists of all kinds that those threats are no such thing.

In recent days, I’ve spoken with many journalists covering DeSantis’ appointment of some conservatives to the board of New College of Florida. These journalists, who clearly see themselves as liberals, allegedly support the ideals of free speech and unfettered research. In our conversations, they gave me ample time to lay out the “Ivory Tower” conception.

We had good conversations; they seemed genuinely curious about the facts. I outlined the mechanisms of peer review and the obligation to withhold political opinions when it came to, say, evaluating candidates for hiring/promotion and manuscripts for publication, which I’ve done for two dozen scholarly presses and journals over the years. I said how great it would be to have a Marxist colleague who understood that students needed a good general education before politics entered in, could detail what Marx said about “commodity fetishism,” and liked to argue over lunch with a conservative like me.

The journalists nodded in agreement, and it felt good to describe some behind-the-scenes protocols that are essential to academia but veiled from the public. When I turned, however, to the greatest current danger to that approach, the most common instrument of political coercion that squarely violates academic norms, my interviewees were a bit quiet, perplexed, and perhaps nervous. I meant, of course, the so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives that nearly every institution in America implements with religious fervor.

In the controversy over New College, the critical question has been whether right-wing trustees will suppress the work of professors and students, imposing a political agenda on a functioning academic enterprise that deserves hands-off respect. It was brought up in all my interviews, usually by reference to Rufo’s ambition to bring classical education to the curriculum. After explaining to them that one duty of a trustee is to ensure that teaching and research practices at an institution accord with the academic mission (in the same way that a trustee of an estate prevents malfeasance),

I put the question of politicization back at them:
How is equity not a political trespass on academic grounds?

They didn’t answer but invited me to elaborate. The problem is simple: Equity requires proportionate representation of diverse identity groups. It is a preordained goal that tips the scales of judgment, weighs the evidence before it comes in, and compromises the inquirer/evaluator. If I review a manuscript for a journal and I’m told that the journal needs to publish more scholars of color, I answer, “Whatever, but that can’t play a role in my assessment.” If I accept an identity factor, I’ve lost some of my academic freedom.  The same could be said for inclusion, which jeopardizes acts of discrimination on which academia depends.

This is obvious. DEI is a form of social engineering that cannot coexist
with “the free search for truth and its free exposition.”

If a DEI officer tells an academic department that in its next job search, the interview list of 12 must be at least 50 percent female regardless of qualification, a trustee who hears about it is duty-bound to call for an investigation. If a school drops standardized testing from admissions because of racial score gaps and in the name of diversity, the same thing should happen.

Again, this is not a political objection but an academic one. DEI acolytes have politicized academic procedures. Stopping them is a return to the tradition of Socrates, Galileo, and the American Association of University Professors’ statement.

I’m speaking generally here, not about New College. I don’t know what these new trustees will do. If I find that professors make students work hard and read widely while producing excellent work, that sounds good to me whether I agree with their sincerely held political beliefs or not. My concerns are over academic quality, not political ideology.

It is likely, though, that indoctrination isn’t unrelated to poor learning outcomes. DEI is an anti-academic project, as it is anti-intellectual and illiberal in its goals and methods. The more colleges add resources to it, the less it focuses on the real job of higher learning, and the more our youths are inclined to believe that correct political attitudes save them the effort of expanding their knowledge, improving skills, and refining tastes.

Nobody is more confident in how wrong he is than a half-educated social justice activist.

Thomas Fazi writes at Unherd How the Davos elite took back control.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The WEF is insulating policy-making from democracy

Thousands of the world’s global elite are convening in Davos this morning for their most important annual get-together: the meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF). Alongside heads of state from all over the world, the CEOs of Amazon, BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase, Pfizer and Moderna will gather, as will the President of the European Commission, the IMF’s Managing Director, the secretary general of Nato, the chiefs of the FBI and MI6, the publisher of The New York Times, and, of course, the event’s infamous host — founder and chairman of the WEF, Klaus Schwab. As many as 5,000 soldiers may be deployed for their protection.

Given the almost cartoonishly elitist nature of this jamboree, it seems only natural that the organisation has become the subject of all sorts of conspiracy theories regarding its supposed malicious intent and secret agendas connected to the notion of the “Great Reset”. In truth, there is nothing conspiratorial about the WEF, to the extent that conspiracies imply secrecy. On the contrary, the WEF — unlike, say, the Bilderberg — is very open about its agenda: you can even follow the live-streamed sessions online.

Founded in 1971 by Schwab himself, the WEF is “committed to improving the state of the world through public-private cooperation”, also known as multistakeholder governance. The idea is that global decision-making should not be left to governments and nation-states — as in the post-war multilateralist framework enshrined in the United Nations — but should involve a whole range of non-government stakeholders: civil society bodies, academic experts, media personalities and, most important, multinational corporations. In its own words, the WEF’s project is “to redefine the international system as constituting a wider, multifaceted system of global cooperation in which intergovernmental legal frameworks and institutions are embedded as a core, but not the sole and sometimes not the most crucial, component”.

While this may sound fairly benign, it neatly encapsulates the basic philosophy of globalism: insulating policy from democracy by transferring the decision-making process from the national and international level, where citizens theoretically are able to exercise some degree of influence over policy, to the supranational level, by placing a self-selected group of unelected, unaccountable “stakeholders” — mainly corporations — in charge of global decisions concerning everything from energy and food production to the media and public health. The underlying undemocratic philosophy is the same one underpinning the philanthrocapitalist approach of people such Bill Gates, himself a long-time partner of the WEF: that non-governmental social and business organisations are best suited to solve the world’s problems than governments and multilateral institutions.

Even though the WEF has increasingly focused its agenda on fashionable topics such as environmental protection and social entrepreneurship, there is little doubt as to which interests Schwab’s brainchild is actually promoting and empowering: the WEF is itself mostly funded by around 1,000 member companies — typically global enterprises with multi-billion dollar turnovers, which include some of the world’s biggest corporations.  .  . There’s no need to resort to conspiracy theories to posit that the WEF’s agenda is much more likely to be tailored to suit the interests of its funders and board members — the world’s ultra-wealthy and corporate elites — rather than to “improving the state of the world”, as the organisation claims.

These public-private and corporate-centred coalitions — all with ties to the WEF, and beyond the reach of democratic accountability — played a crucial role in promoting a vaccine-centric and profit-driven response to the pandemic, and then in overseeing the vaccine rollout. In other words, the pandemic brought into stark relief the consequences of the WEF’s decades-long globalist push. Again, it would be wrong to view this as a conspiracy, since the WEF has always been very candid about its objectives: this is simply the inevitable result of a “multistakeholderist” approach in which private and “philanthropic” interests are given greater voice in global affairs than most governments.

What is troubling, however, is that the WEF is now promoting the same top-down corporate-driven approach in a wide range of other domains, from energy to food to global surveillance policies — with equally dramatic consequences. There is a reason governments often seem so willing to go along with these policies, even in the face of widespread societal opposition: which is that the WEF’s strategy, over the years, hasn’t just been to shift power away from governments — but also to infiltrate the latter.

In 2017, Schwab admitted to having used the Young Global Leaders to “penetrate the cabinets” of several governments, adding that as of 2017, “more than half” of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet had been members of the programme. More recently, following Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s proposal to drastically cut nitrogen emissions in line with WEF-inspired “green” policies, sparking large protests in the country, critics drew attention to the fact that, in addition to Rutte himself having close ties to the WEF, his Minister of Social Affairs and Employment was elected WEF Young Global Leader in 2008, while his Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Sigrid Kaag is a contributor to the WEF’s agenda. In December 2021, the Dutch government published its past correspondence with representatives of the World Economic Forum, showing extensive interaction between the WEF and the Dutch government.

Ultimately, there is no denying that the WEF wields immense power, which has cemented the rule of the transnational capitalist class to a degree never before seen in history. But it is important to recognise that its power is simply a manifestation of the power of the “superclass” it represents — a tiny group amounting, according to researchers, to no more than 6,000 or 7,000 people, or 0.0001% of the world’s population, and yet more powerful than any social class the world has ever known. Samuel Huntington, who is credited with inventing the term “Davos man”, argued that members of this global elite “have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations”. It was only a matter of time before these aspiring cosmocrats developed a tool through which to fully exercise their dominion over the lower classes — and the WEF proved to be the perfect vehicle to do so.

Rex Murphy takes it from there in his National Post article The green druids gather in Davos for the World Economic Forum.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The WEF really is just a very upper-class version of the equally squalid
monster conference of the IPCC

And now, Mary Ngand Chrystia Freeland are off to the frigid Alps to the great sentinel resort of Davos where the world’s richest and most powerful macrocephalics have flown in on a fleet of private jets only slightly less numerous, and surely more luxurious, than the Chinese Air Force.

Ms. Ng is to give a talk with the captivating title of “Bricks or Flicks.”

Its subject — and I do not invent this — is the “intangible economy.” Which is a piece of inspired bureaucratese, a perfect designation of the woesome triune of Freeland’s debt economics, the net-zero fantasy, and the Trudeau vision of an Alberta done in by green dreams and stripped of all its oil and gas.

The latter goes by the admittedly less poetically-charged terminology of the “just transition” — the great scheme to de-employ over a hundred thousand oil and gas workers, thousands upon thousands more in related industries, and put the whole multitude of them to work in a giant Tim Hortons somewhere north, far north, of Edmonton. I’ll get back to this.

Only the wonder of the densely militarised WEF-Davos shindig detains me by its bloat, self-importance and planetary pretensions.

Up to 5,000 troops have been seconded to guard the illustrious hive of busybody billionaires (roughly two soldiers for every one pretentious plutocrat). Barbed wire around the town, snipers on rooftops, huge armoured vehicles, wickedly-armed and black-helmeted SWAT-type police outside the best hotels and upscale restaurants (the latter offering GG Mary Simon level of cuisine — amuse your bouche) fighter jets overhead, 24 -hour air police — this year’s WEF is more heavily guarded than Joe Biden’s Corvette, or Jeffery Epstein’s still-unproduced client list.

Re-ordering the world and reaching down to the peasants, even in famously neutral Switzerland, must be a very dangerous occupation, or, I suppose, all the high-brows and vastly deep pockets gathered there have such a deep appreciation of their own importance that they — more or less — feel they must travel with their own armed forces.

Davos and the WEF really is just a very upper-class version of the equally squalid monster conference of the IPCC, the annual COP convention of green druids, who, like their Davos counterparts gather, to plot a new-world-order, and from great vast altitudes of righteousness and moral egotism come down from the mountain tops with their iPad tablets inscribed with a prescription for all the rest (the sane part) of the world.

It’s out of these festivals of elitists and ideologues that come the policies and regimentations of national economies, and a subtle but deep abrasion of real national interests in the service of the globalist stew of ideals. Like, shall we say, intangible economies.

In Canada, that vision found great hospitality in the Trudeau-Butts-Freeland-Singh policy cohabitation, and is even now running amok.

Just the latest instance. We have had the Prime Minister of Japan all but turned away from our doors when he came recently looking for some help on energy, particularly natural gas. Sorry, we don’t do natural gas (that’s from Alberta) is a very rough translation of the response he received from green-renewables-Trudeau.

Off went billions to Qatar. Off too, I’d gather, Germany’s and Japan’s respect for Canada as an ally and a buttress in times of need. The poor chancellor got instead a promise — 10 years down the road if ever — from a hydrogen producing plant, not even yet in the planning stages (it’s intangible, see how this works), in Stephenville on Newfoundland’s West Coast.

Mary Ng’s talk-title Bricks and Flicks fits this scene perfectly. Cuteness trying to do the work of thought, flippancy over seriousness, swishing about hot and cold world venues, while ignoring — sorry grossly interfering and on full plan for shutdown — an economy that works we already have.

Summed up, for me anyway, by Mr. Trudeau, when in one of his New Year seances with the network anchors he threw this piece of insolence at the government of Alberta — the one quoted at the top — which bears repetition: “One of the challenges is there is a political class in Alberta that has decided that anything to do with climate change is going to be bad for them or for Alberta.” Co-operative federalism in an age of Green.

It’s a long way from Davos to Red Deer, but only on the map.