Posted on 03/06/2006 3:16:19 AM PST by ricks_place
WHAT went wrong at Harvard?
Tomorrow, Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences will meet for the first time since the resignation of the university's president, Lawrence H. Summers, two weeks ago. The dean of Arts and Sciences, William Kirby, resigned in late January, reportedly after clashing with Mr. Summers. When Mr. Summers leaves on July 1, there will be a serious leadership vacuum at Harvard, which has been torn by strife during his short five-year tenure.
Larry Summers, a former Treasury secretary, assumed the presidency with a high sense of mission. Determined to effect change, he took bold and confrontational positions. He endorsed proposals to expand the campus across the Charles River to Allston, attacked anti-Semitism and rampant grade inflation and laudably argued for the return of R.O.T.C. to Harvard.
But whatever his good intentions, Mr. Summers often inspired more heat than light. His stellar early career as an economics professor did not prepare him for dealing with an ingrown humanities faculty that has been sunk in political correctness for decades. As president, he had a duty to research the tribal creeds and customs of those he wished to convert. Foolishly thinking plain speech and common sense would suffice, he flunked Academic Anthropology 101.
While many issues are rumored to have played a role in Mr. Summers's resignation (including charges of favoritism in a messy legal case involving foreign investments), the controversy that will inevitably symbolize his presidency was the manufactured outcry early last year over his glancing reference at a conference to possible innate differences between the sexes in aptitude for science and math. The feminist pressure groups rose en masse from their lavishly feathered nests and set up a furious cackle that led to a 218-to-185 vote of no confidence by the Faculty...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
for later
A good dose of reality might serve well to heal the ailing academic. Just my humble, flea-bitten opinion. ;)
NYT crap.
IGNORE.
I read the article and like the premise, but Camille is really too cute by half when she tries to play both sides of the positions. I think she's really serving a constituency of one when she writes. Maybe two when she looks into the mirror in the morning.
Academia condemned itself to mediocrity when it foreswore Truth in favor of the Politically Correct Leftist Agenda.
Now that's good writing. Paglia and Hitchens are about the only leftists worth reading.
Agreed. But, read the rest of the left to understand your adversary.
College Education ping list.
Our first ping. Same subject, but Paglia has some good lines, and I had not seen this article earlier.
Yes, this is a good ping. I have been working on a project that suggests that there are simply few checks and balances left in my part of academe (the Humanities broadly constructed.)
One can point to the fact that Michael Bellisles was able to publish in the best journals what was very questionable data simply because his take on guns paralleled what editors on the left wanted to hear.
Two years later, I was attending a conference on methodology when a group of professors led a furous attack on the (all-left) panel that said he had cooked his data and led to his dismissal. One really young professor snarled that we ought to check the political backgrounds of those who were on the panel. Had I, a conservative, ever said such a thing, I would have been accused of McCarthyism.
Until we institute real checks and balances--perhaps outside of academe--our students will be deprived of their academic freedom and we will be deprived of a truly educated generation of young adults.
McVey
bttt
This sounds like a practical approach, but, offhand, I have to disagree that it could have worked in Summers' case.
Summers never would have gotten his job if he had been a conservative. And conservatives are the ones who have been analyzing the "tribal creeds an customs" of the Leftists.
I think Summers' confrontation with the oversensitive Lefties was practically, speaking, inevitable.
The first person who is brave enough to confront a massively entrenched group that has been in power for a long time, is most likely going to be "sacrificed," especially if that person does not have many people on his side.
Yet, the lone confronter does everybody a service by calling attention to the problem, like a canary in a mine.
I don't think Summers should be blamed for what honesty he showed.
LOL!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.