Commentary When I was young and inexperienced, with no money and no career, I nonetheless made a firm assumption about people who’d made it, who’d risen to the top of their fields. They were daring individuals, I thought, outspoken and candid, willing to go against the crowd. These were people with a skeptical eye on the conventional wisdom, ever ready to challenge and dispute whenever they sensed a stale assertion of it. When I worked for Dana Gioia at the National Endowment for the Arts, he told me once that when he was in advertising his team would meet at the end of the year to review themselves, and they spent five times as many minutes discussing what they did wrong as they spent on what they did right. That was the kind of toughness I imagined happened in every elite circle. Look at the leaders of institutions, today, however, and you witness a pageant …