Institutional rot. That’s the verdict recorded in recent days on the performance of leading institutions by observers not known for pessimistic temperaments or alarmist analysis.

One occasion for such judgments was the testimony of three presidents of eminent universities — Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania — before a House committee on Dec. 6. In response to questions from Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), a Harvard graduate, all three said calls for genocide of Jews might violate university rules, depending on “context.”

That might sound like a principled defense of free speech, however repugnant. But coming from the chief executives of schools that punish teachers and students for being “fatphobic,” using unwanted pronouns or asserting there are two sexes, it was a double standard at best and at worst an example of how people who are deemed members of oppressor groups are now treated as if they lack the rights and privileges of those deemed members of groups considered oppressed.

“A dark day for American higher education,” ordinarily equanimous economist Tyler Cowen proclaimed in his blog, Marginal Revolution. “They have ended up disgracing their universities, in front of massive audiences (the largest they ever will have?), simply” for maintaining “maximum defensibility for their positions within their universities.”

The hearing prompted the Wall Street Journal’s Walter Russell Mead to post that “the Ivies” — leading universities, though MIT is not in the Ivy League — “reel from the inept performance of their deeply mediocre leaders.” That’s a scalding comment for a writer whose histories are imbued with optimism about the United States.

Meanwhile, historian Niall Ferguson, formerly at Harvard, decries “the willingness of trustees, donors, and alumni to tolerate the politicization of American universities by an illiberal coalition of ‘woke’ progressives, adherents of ‘critical race theory,’ and apologists for Islamist extremism.”

The conduct of leaders of other supposedly intellectually distinguished institutions has also come in for scathing criticism from unlikely quarters.

Statistics expert and self-described liberal Nate Silver called a March 2020 paper — written at the behest of then-National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci and National Institutes of Health head Francis Collins to discredit the theory that COVID was spread by a leak from the Wuhan, China, laboratory — “a PR exercise rather than an effort to seek the truth.” Amid evidence that Fauci and Collins used their control of federal research funding to downplay Fauci’s culpability for approval of dangerous research in Wuhan, Silver writes the paper “did enormous harm to science and it should be retracted.”

Just as devastating is the description by liberal writers Joseph Nocera and Bethany McLean in City Journal and their book “The Big Fail” as the “unprecedented disaster” of the COVID lockdowns urged, against previous expert consensus, by Fauci and others in government and out.

It is one of mankind’s weaknesses that even in the most functional societies, success breeds failure.