Open this photo in gallery: Elizabeth Magill during a House Committee on Education and the Workforce hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on Dec. 5. Magill resigned on Saturday as the University of Pennsylvania’s president after criticism of her answers at the hearing.TOM BRENNER/The New York Times News Service War is a great engine of change. But no one expected that the conflict in the Middle East would solidify a profound alteration in American culture: the eclipse of the reverence for selective universities that until recently was one of the defining characteristics of the country. It isn’t that the fumbling...