A more pessimistic 1, 3, 10, and 30 years

by Dale Cohen

1 year: Pretty much the same as today. Large institutions have a lot of inertia and they don't change rapidly.

3 years: As it becomes apparent that wokeness, DE&I and all the rest of the nonsense has had less effect on the last redoubts of rigor (math, the physical sciences, and engineering) than hoped, the establishment makes an all-out assault on accreditation standards, admissions, hiring, and of course content/rigor. Anybody who wants to keep his/her job goes along with the assault.

10 years: The decline to at best second-rate status of even formerly world-class American institutions (universities, laboratories, corporations, government agencies) is increasingly obvious. World-class talent from outside the United States no longer is drawn to these institutions. World-class talent from the United States often goes elsewhere. This cycle further drives those institutions into the hands of the woke apparatchiks. In some ways, it's actually irrelevant, since the United States is broke and in the grip of hyper-inflation. It can't afford the investments required for world-class institutions or their work.

30 years: After economic and social collapse, the United States no longer exists in any form that would be recognizable in 2022. There has been some combination of dissolution of the country, chaos and tyranny. The interesting question is whether the values and characteristics that enabled the United States to thrive in the past still exist in a critical mass elsewhere, or whether the world enters a new Dark Age.