The student giving a tour at an elite American university this summer hit all the right points: what the core and elective courses are, how hard they are, and what campus life is like. It’s what the guide didn’t do that raised my eyebrow. Suddenly, there was no land acknowledgment.

It was like Sherlock Holmes’s famous “Dog That Didn’t Bark,” where the Victorian sleuth deduced whodunnit from something that hadn’t happened — in this instance, a stable dog that did not raise the alarm while a horse was being stolen. The perpetrator was the horse’s trainer, Holmes rightly reasoned.

And in this college tour there was no talk of what Indian tribe happened to be based on or around the land where the university is located at the precise moment the first Europeans showed up and took it, just as the tribe had taken it from a previous tribe or nation, who had taken it from a previous tribe or nation, etc., ad infinitum.

Or, come to think of it, there was a land acknowledgement, but it was of the right type. When the guide spoke up about the origins of the town where the university is located, the talk was all about when it was founded and by whom. It was an acknowledgment of the people to whom we actually owe a debt of gratitude, who created lasting things, things from which all Americans today benefit.

The times, in other words, may be going back to normal. The woke fever may have broken. The moment of mass hysteria may have passed.

We see a concrete sign of this in Columbia’s surrender to the........

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