Posted on 02/25/2006 10:23:21 AM PST by Khankrumthebulgar
February 22nd, 2006
The American left, long in decline, has shored up its base, definitively seizing the high ground of American academia. The resignation of Lawrence Summers as president of Harvard University, the nation’s oldest, and the world’s richest and most prestigious university, marks a significant coup d’etat for the left.
A faction, only a plurality within one segment of the university, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, has proven its ability to drive from office a brilliant and energetic leader who had been committed to pushing Harvard a little bit back toward the political center.
The breaking point began to unfold when Summers dared to entertain as a possible hypothesis that there might be inherent differences between men and women, which in turn might affect the success females experience in mathematical and scientific endeavors. It has now been established that orthodox feminism, not free intellectual inquiry, determines what may be said by the leaders of Harvard. “Veritas,” Latin for “truth” should be replaced as Harvard’s official motto by some other expression. Perhaps the motto of the Red Guards during China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: “Politics in command.”
But Summers’ sins were multiple. He dared to suggest to Afro-American Studies Professor Cornell West that recording rap albums was not consistent with his scholarly function. He encouraged Harvard to return ROTC to campus, from which it had been expelled in an earlier wave of leftist bullying in 1969, and commended the value of patriotism. He spoke of the problem of grade inflation. And he dared to suggest that anti-Israel agitation, in the absence of comparable agitation over the same issues existing in other countries, smelled of anti-Semitism.
Summers was correct on each and every one of these points. Almost undoubtedly, a broad majority of Americans would support him, if informed of the specifics and asked about them. But America’s campuses are becoming further and further removed from America’s mainstream values, a situation which will benefit neither academia nor society in the long run.
The visible abandonment of the disinterested pursuit of the truth at a flagship institution undermines the rationale for taxpayer-funded grants and loans, subsidies to state institutions, private philanthropy, and ultimately to the prestige which is the foundation of the academy’s power in American life. At a time when knowledge and innovation matter more than ever, a critical generator of these resources is going on the fritz.
One would think that when leadership of an institution powered by a nearly $26 billion endowment is being contested, there would be a fight to the end. Instead, Summers preemptively surrendered. Presumably this means that he understood he lacked the backing (where it counts – on the Harvard Corporation) to endure in the face of a challenge.
What is bizarre is that the challenge came by only from leftists, who so far have failed to demonstrate more than a plurality of support within only one of the many faculties which comprise Harvard.
The Harvard Corporation, which governs Harvard University, could boast that it is the oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere. Some within Harvard like to note that Harvard is also the world’s first decentralized corporation. Each of the faculties – such as Law, Medicine, Business, Dentistry, Design, Public Health, Education, Divinity, and the grand daddy of them all, Arts and Sciences – has its own endowment account, sets its own tuition, appoints its own faculty (tenure is subject to approval of the president – one of the few direct powers Summers enjoyed), and generally governs itself.
There is an old saying within administrative circles at Harvard: “Every Tub its Own Bottom,” (so familiar it is abbreviated ETOB) meaning (among other things) that the price of such autonomy is that the impecunious Divinity School or Education School must scramble to pay their bills, never mind that the Faculties of Medicine, Law and Business experience much greater success in dunning their wealthy graduates for donations.
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which includes humanities and social sciences faculty members, is the most leftist-inclined among the various “tubs.” Because the FAS teaches undergraduates, as well as graduate students not enrolled in the professional schools, it tends to be regarded as the “real” university. Its classrooms and offices dominate Harvard Yard and the central campus in Cambridge familiar to most visitors.
Because so many undergraduates go on to enjoy great material success, the FAS is able to raise significant monies from alumni, and receives large gifts from outsiders to establish academic programs, research institutes, and other organs for funding and carrying out scholarship and teaching.
The seven members of the Harvard Corporation evidently failed to rally around Summers, even though he serves as one of them. The fatal weakness of this power elite is that much of university life depends on willing adherence to norms and standards, rather than on incentives, detailed regulations, and penalties. This reliance on social control mechanisms rather than formal structures, empowers minority factions to create such a ruckus that fears of “ungovernability” arise. As the Boston Globe editorialized today, “Summers was losing the ability to be effective….”
The lesson is now clear. Even the most powerful of universities can be bullied by a minority within a minority segment of the university. By yelling and protesting, by embarrassing with a potential vote of non-support, and ultimately by threatening non-compliance with the sacred informal rules governing academic life, the wealthy and influential members of even the most prestigious governing boards can be cowed.
Because Harvard, for better or worse, is a role model for much of the rest of American higher education, the lesson will be learned on every campus. Truth is out and the power of protestors is in.
A nascent dark age threatens the heart of our national ability to discover new knowledge, right at the critical point where young minds are trained and basic outlines of knowledge are set. It does not augur well for anyone other than enemies of our civilization, who reject new knowledge and innovation.
Thomas Lifson is the editor and publisher of The American Thinker. He received graduate degrees from and served as a member of both the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Faculty of Business Administration at Harvard.
The American left, long in decline, has shored up its base, definitively seizing the high ground of American academia. The resignation of Lawrence Summers as president of Harvard University, the nation’s oldest, and the world’s richest and most prestigious university, marks a significant coup d’etat for the left.
A faction, only a plurality within one segment of the university, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, has proven its ability to drive from office a brilliant and energetic leader who had been committed to pushing Harvard a little bit back toward the political center.
The breaking point began to unfold when Summers dared to entertain as a possible hypothesis that there might be inherent differences between men and women, which in turn might affect the success females experience in mathematical and scientific endeavors. It has now been established that orthodox feminism, not free intellectual inquiry, determines what may be said by the leaders of Harvard. “Veritas,” Latin for “truth” should be replaced as Harvard’s official motto by some other expression. Perhaps the motto of the Red Guards during China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: “Politics in command.”
But Summers’ sins were multiple. He dared to suggest to Afro-American Studies Professor Cornell West that recording rap albums was not consistent with his scholarly function. He encouraged Harvard to return ROTC to campus, from which it had been expelled in an earlier wave of leftist bullying in 1969, and commended the value of patriotism. He spoke of the problem of grade inflation. And he dared to suggest that anti-Israel agitation, in the absence of comparable agitation over the same issues existing in other countries, smelled of anti-Semitism.
Summers was correct on each and every one of these points. Almost undoubtedly, a broad majority of Americans would support him, if informed of the specifics and asked about them. But America’s campuses are becoming further and further removed from America’s mainstream values, a situation which will benefit neither academia nor society in the long run.
The visible abandonment of the disinterested pursuit of the truth at a flagship institution undermines the rationale for taxpayer-funded grants and loans, subsidies to state institutions, private philanthropy, and ultimately to the prestige which is the foundation of the academy’s power in American life. At a time when knowledge and innovation matter more than ever, a critical generator of these resources is going on the fritz.
One would think that when leadership of an institution powered by a nearly $26 billion endowment is being contested, there would be a fight to the end. Instead, Summers preemptively surrendered. Presumably this means that he understood he lacked the backing (where it counts – on the Harvard Corporation) to endure in the face of a challenge.
What is bizarre is that the challenge came by only from leftists, who so far have failed to demonstrate more than a plurality of support within only one of the many faculties which comprise Harvard.
The Harvard Corporation, which governs Harvard University, could boast that it is the oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere. Some within Harvard like to note that Harvard is also the world’s first decentralized corporation. Each of the faculties – such as Law, Medicine, Business, Dentistry, Design, Public Health, Education, Divinity, and the grand daddy of them all, Arts and Sciences – has its own endowment account, sets its own tuition, appoints its own faculty (tenure is subject to approval of the president – one of the few direct powers Summers enjoyed), and generally governs itself.
There is an old saying within administrative circles at Harvard: “Every Tub its Own Bottom,” (so familiar it is abbreviated ETOB) meaning (among other things) that the price of such autonomy is that the impecunious Divinity School or Education School must scramble to pay their bills, never mind that the Faculties of Medicine, Law and Business experience much greater success in dunning their wealthy graduates for donations.
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which includes humanities and social sciences faculty members, is the most leftist-inclined among the various “tubs.” Because the FAS teaches undergraduates, as well as graduate students not enrolled in the professional schools, it tends to be regarded as the “real” university. Its classrooms and offices dominate Harvard Yard and the central campus in Cambridge familiar to most visitors.
Because so many undergraduates go on to enjoy great material success, the FAS is able to raise significant monies from alumni, and receives large gifts from outsiders to establish academic programs, research institutes, and other organs for funding and carrying out scholarship and teaching.
The seven members of the Harvard Corporation evidently failed to rally around Summers, even though he serves as one of them. The fatal weakness of this power elite is that much of university life depends on willing adherence to norms and standards, rather than on incentives, detailed regulations, and penalties. This reliance on social control mechanisms rather than formal structures, empowers minority factions to create such a ruckus that fears of “ungovernability” arise. As the Boston Globe editorialized today, “Summers was losing the ability to be effective….”
The lesson is now clear. Even the most powerful of universities can be bullied by a minority within a minority segment of the university. By yelling and protesting, by embarrassing with a potential vote of non-support, and ultimately by threatening non-compliance with the sacred informal rules governing academic life, the wealthy and influential members of even the most prestigious governing boards can be cowed.
Because Harvard, for better or worse, is a role model for much of the rest of American higher education, the lesson will be learned on every campus. Truth is out and the power of protestors is in.
A nascent dark age threatens the heart of our national ability to discover new knowledge, right at the critical point where young minds are trained and basic outlines of knowledge are set. It does not augur well for anyone other than enemies of our civilization, who reject new knowledge and innovation.
Thomas Lifson is the editor and publisher of The American Thinker. He received graduate degrees from and served as a member of both the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Faculty of Business Administration at Harvard.
I thought the left already had Havard. The news is that the left now has more of it. What would really be news is if Harvard was captured by the right.
bump
X'actly.
Pay attention. It's coming to a company near you soon.
Please refresh my memory. Which university in the northeast had graduate instructors/teaching assistants attempting to unionise? I thought that it was Harvard.
YEP....already having shakedowns of large Corporations....
Dog bites man.
Yale.
Thanks. I had forgotten which Ivy League school had that problem. One of my leftist colleagues sent an e-mail to me urging me to sign a petition on behalf of the striking students. I deleted the e-mail.
Consider deleting the friend.
She is just a colleague and not a friend. She sent the e-mail to everyone in our department regardless of their political affliations.
I think NYU had that problem, also.
Geez, and this guy was a flaming liberal otherwise. Hell, I guess we're making progress. Some of the hard-core libs are starting to see some things the correct way and the rest are just eating their own.
Not true.. If so Cornel West and Chomsky would have been laughed off the campus years ago.. Whats happened is the RINOS were defeated, or humilated.. and since RINOs are basically less crazy democrats nothing has changed.. NOTHING... RINOs are drones the overt socialists are the bees..
I took a few graduate courses at Harvard. I thought the campus was absolutely beautiful, but it was like a perfumed corpse in the arena of ideas.
Students marched around like cultish storm troopers, shouting curses at Ronald Reagan, erecting "shanty towns" on the quadrangles in solidarity with Marxism in Africa, and hanging effigies of Judge Bork from trees (literally).
Don Feder had it right in that article you posted:
Instead of singing hymns, they'e sitting in the lotus position, chantingomm; at America's oldest school of theology. The Naves calendar reminds students that March 20 is Spring Ohigon, a special time to listen to the Buddha and meditate on the perfection of enlightenment; Wouldn't miss it for the world. The next day is the Zoroastrian holiday of Naw Ruz;.There's no mention of Palm Sunday or Passover, reflecting their insignificance at an institution where all is venerated, save Western religion.These poison-ivy covered walls harbor a deep-seated contempt for Christi-anity. In The Nave's community forum, a third-year student sniffs: Christianity; the whole of it is a sect. With its baptism and Eucharist borrowed from the Greek mystery religions; its cross a transformed Egyp-tian ankh, its clergy modeled on Roman bureaucracy, and so on. The author speaks affectionately of Native American religion possessing “none-too-primitive beliefs regarding human immortality and inter-dependence ofhumanity and nature. Get thee to a shaman's teepee! Then again, why bother. The shamen, gurus, witch doctors and mahatmas have all come to Harvard. Here, says my friend, all religions are equal except Christian-ity, which is very bad, and Judaism, which loses points where it intersects with Christianity. Its graduates will go on to propagate their Mork fromOrk theology in churches where cobwebs outnumber congregates. They will assume leadership of ecclesiastical bodies with dwindling rosters thatno one, especially their members, takes seriously. God is killing mainline Protestantism in America, observes a Methodist theologian at Duke Uni-versity, and we well deserve it. Why go to church when you can get the same message in the pages of Ms. magazine or the collected writings of Kim Ill Sung? What' up at the Harvard Divinity School? Mystic crystal emanations and the soul's annihilation. Will the last graduating Christian please collect the Bibles and turn out the lights?
You're right.
The LEFT has owned Harvard for YEARS!
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