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Author Message   dougw Citizen Username: Dougw Post Number: 718 Registered: 3-2005 Posted on Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - 4:17 pm:        Veritas at Harvard February 22, 2006; WSJ Editorial A Harvard education isn't what it used to be. That's the principal lesson of yesterday's news that Lawrence Summers is resigning as the 27th president of the nation's oldest university. By "used to be," we mean the days before the faculty ran the academic asylum, the days when administrators, students and, yes, even the trustees also had a say in setting priorities and making decisions about how a great university is run. If you remember such a time, you probably graduated with the Class of 1965 or earlier. In a letter posted on Harvard's Web site yesterday, Mr. Summers said that "I have reluctantly concluded that the rifts between me and segments of the Arts and Sciences faculty make it infeasible for me to advance the agenda of renewal that I see as crucial to Harvard's future." Those "rifts" included quarrels with a largely left-wing faculty that has about as much intellectual diversity as the Pyongyang parliament. Or, as a group of Harvard protesters so charmingly put it a year or so ago, "Racist, sexist, anti-gay -- Larry Summers, you must pay." Only on an American university campus could Mr. Summers, a former Clinton Treasury Secretary, be portrayed as a radical neocon. Early in his tenure, Mr. Summers ran up against black studies superstar Cornel West, when he suggested that the scholar take time out from writing rap songs to do some serious academic work. He later bucked faculty who wanted Harvard to end its investments in Israel and warned that anti-Semitism was no longer just the purview of the ill-educated but is on the rise in elite institutions. He pushed for the return of ROTC to Harvard (without success) and told school audiences that the U.S. military deserves more respect than it was getting on campus. But his biggest transgression against current Harvard manners was his suggestion, at an academic conference a year ago, that it might be worth studying whether there are innate gender differences that might explain why so few women have reached the pinnacles of science and math. That much misquoted remark prompted a no-confidence vote by the Harvard Arts and Sciences faculty, a vote that was widely expected to be repeated next week. Mr. Summers's fate has unfortunately become all too typical at elite schools in recent decades. The Dartmouth faculty looked down on David McLaughlin as an "anti-intellectual" (he had an M.B.A. instead of a Ph.D.); he was run out of Hanover in 1987 over bitter quarrels over ROTC and disinvestment from South Africa. Benno Schmidt left Yale in 2001, saying his six-year tenure had been marked "by more argument . . . than I would have wished." Donald Kagan, the dean of Yale College who had handed in his resignation a few weeks earlier, was franker, noting the threat from an "imperial faculty." Mr. Summers isn't known for his bonhomie, and no doubt his personality didn't make him many friends. But it's also true that, in the wake of his "gender" comments, he bent over backward to apologize and to placate his liberal critics -- albeit to no avail. As one Harvard professor told us, Mr. Summers's retreat in the face of such criticism has left campus political dissenters even more isolated. On Harvard's coat of arms, a crimson field contains a trio of open books on which is imprinted the word "Veritas" -- Latin for "truth." In his first commencement address as president, Mr. Summers spoke of his vision of Harvard as a place "open to all ideas" and "committed to a diversity of perspectives." We wish Mr. Summers's successor good luck with that one.   mrmaplewood Citizen Username: Mrmaplewood Post Number: 299 Registered: 5-2001 Posted on Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - 4:36 pm:        It was a grand show of his managerial expertise when he made the comments about male gender superiority. Is it a wonder that he has been run out of town on a rail? He made his own bed. Oh, and by the way, I wonder if he had made the same type of remarks about female superiority instead, would the political repercussions have been nearly as strong. I think not.   themp Supporter Username: Themp Post Number: 2581 Registered: 12-2001 Posted on Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - 4:38 pm:        WSJ editorial page is crap. But Cornell West is crap, too. If the WSJ believed in the market power of rational consumers, they would have to conclude that Harvard is a highly desirable destination.   dougw Citizen Username: Dougw Post Number: 720 Registered: 3-2005 Posted on Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - 4:43 pm:        Themp where did they say that a Harvard degree was a bad investment?   themp Supporter Username: Themp Post Number: 2582 Registered: 12-2001 Posted on Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - 4:47 pm:        "A Harvard education isn't what it used to be" right there.   Scrotis Lo Knows Citizen Username: Scrotisloknows Post Number: 824 Registered: 10-2005 Posted on Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - 4:47 pm:        themp- And the WSJ editorial page is crap? Can your please provide an example of an uncrappy editorial page? And how ironic for the title of the post. The President discusses possible reasons for the differences in career paths, including physiological differences and he is shunned. So much for diversity. -SLK   joel dranove Citizen Username: Jdranove Post Number: 85 Registered: 1-2006 Posted on Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - 4:51 pm:        mrmaplewood: he never said anything about gender superiority. he spoke about factual differences in academic employment, not accounted for by statistical variation, and asked the audience to propose reasons for these differences. at harvard, such is heresy to the faculty of arts. the student body voted in an obviously non-binding referendum by a majority of 3 to 1, to back the cowardly summer's retention. obviously, his gender was gelded by the academic elite. he quit. my shift/caps key is broken jd   dougw Citizen Username: Dougw Post Number: 721 Registered: 3-2005 Posted on Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - 4:59 pm:        Themp - a Harvard degree and a Harvard education are two different things.   notehead Supporter Username: Notehead Post Number: 3068 Registered: 5-2001 Posted on Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - 5:00 pm:        I think the outrage over his remarks was ridiculous, and his words may have been deliberately taken out of context for political reasons. He probably should have known such statements might easily be used against him, but the response was really over the top. People are too eager to pounce on anything that might remotely be construed as politically incorrect.   mrmaplewood Citizen Username: Mrmaplewood Post Number: 300 Registered: 5-2001 Posted on Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - 5:02 pm:        Were you there, or did you read it verbatim?   Nohero Supporter Username: Nohero Post Number: 5078 Registered: 10-1999 Posted on Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - 5:09 pm:        You can read it verbatim - http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html   themp Supporter Username: Themp Post Number: 2583 Registered: 12-2001 Posted on Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - 5:12 pm:        Jeez. I know some Harvard grads, and they all are pretty smart, esp now that they toned down the legacy thing. This is a favorite game of crabby conservatives - being haters. "Oh, Harvard is so lame now, not like during the classical era of Greek and Latin."   dave23 Citizen Username: Dave23 Post Number: 1363 Registered: 5-2001 Posted on Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - 5:18 pm:        The horror! The horror!   dougw Citizen Username: Dougw Post Number: 722 Registered: 3-2005 Posted on Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - 5:28 pm:        I remember one of the female professors present when Summers made the comments about gender said she was so upset that she was phyiscally ill and almost fainted. Thoes liberal women are so weak   joel dranove Citizen Username: Jdranove Post Number: 87 Registered: 1-2006 Posted on Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - 5:52 pm:        Hormonal? jd   Southerner Citizen Username: Southerner Post Number: 709 Registered: 2-2004 Posted on Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - 7:01 pm:        Come on, give the libs a break. They only have a few institutions left to feel good about themselves. They have a handful of states on the coasts and then universities. And what is great, is the student body as a whole is coming out more conservative due to these type of university administrations. These libs think they are getting their point across to these students but are actually having the opposite effect. Maybe not at the elite liberal schools but thankfully there are only a few of them and their numbers pale in comparison to major state schools.   Dave Supporter Username: Dave Post Number: 8734 Registered: 4-1997 Posted on Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - 9:21 pm:        I think Harvard profs were as ignorant in their no confidence vote as Summers was in giving that speech.   Eponymous Citizen Username: Eponymous Post Number: 110 Registered: 6-2004 Posted on Thursday, February 23, 2006 - 8:45 am:        Alan Dershowitz was talking about crazy left-wingers driving out Summers, so I don't think referring to the "libs" is fair here. Read the transcript of his remarks; it's enlightening.