Free Republic

Embattled Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers announced today that he will step down at the end of this academic year, ending one of the shortest tenures in the university's history. In a posting on the university website, Summers, the former secretary of the Treasury, said he will resign as of June 30. "Working closely with all parts of the Harvard community, and especially with our remarkable students, has been one of the great joys of my professional life," he said in the open letter to the Harvard community. "However, I have reluctantly concluded that the rifts between me and segments...

Members of Harvard University's governing board are mulling whether President Lawrence Summers should step down before a scheduled Feb. 28 faculty vote on a motion of no-confidence in his leadership, say people familiar with the matter. These people say members of the board, known as the Harvard Corporation, have become increasingly concerned that continued faculty discontent with Mr. Summers, a former U.S. treasury secretary, is hurting the university. Mr. Summers, who took over as president in 2001, has alienated some faculty members with a brusque management style and sometimes-outspoken views. The corporation names the president and is the only authority...

Dinesh D’Souza, one of my heroes, is usually credited with popularizing the term, “political correctness”. He explains in his book, “Letters To A Young Conservative”, that “political correctness is about pretending, about publicly insisting that something is true, when we know privately that it isn’t, about shutting down people who won’t conform to the prevailing orthodoxy”. I have to stretch this formal definition to cover two of my three examples below, but in all three areas liberals certainly like to shut people up who disagree with them. The politically correct positions on manmade global warming is that it is happening...

BOSTON, June 4 - A majority of Harvard alumni believe that the university's president, Lawrence H. Summers, has done a good job over all and should not resign, according to a poll conducted for a new independent alumni magazine. In January, Dr. Summers ignited a firestorm when he suggested that "intrinsic aptitude" could be one reason that there are few women in science and engineering. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences in March passed a resolution expressing a lack of confidence in Dr. Summers's leadership. The majority of respondents to the survey, 62 percent, said they disagreed with Dr. Summers's...

Yakima, Washington was the home away from the Supreme Court of William O. Douglas, the Court's premier defender of free speech. Embodying his legacy, a high-school student in Yakima has taken on the majority of the Harvard faculty for flunking President Lawrence Summers for his exercise of politically incorrect free speech. The article in the Yakima Herald-Republic (March 29) advised: You have right of free speech -- as long as it's politically correct.

When Lawrence Summers suggested that biology might be partially responsible for the relative rarity of female mathematics professors, he was provoking an academic giant. Powerful as the president of Harvard may be, his influence is as nothing compared with that of the behemoth that is the women’s studies movement. The field of women’s studies originated in the heady sixties and grew exponentially through the seventies and eighties. By the mid-nineties, when Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge published Professing Feminism, their searing critique of the field, more than 600 undergraduate and several dozen graduate women’s studies programs were up and running...

Harvard Chick Profs vs. the “Ice Princess” March 23, 2005 By Debbie Schlussel Oops. Lawrence Summers isn’t from Hollywood, and he’s not a sexy starlet from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” or “Sex and the City.” If only he underwent an “Extreme Makeover” to fit these characteristics, Summers might get away with his comments about lack of women in the sciences in academia. After all, the Harvard President--who continues to be under fire for attributing gender differences to a lack of women in the sciences--recently suffered a vote of no confidence by Harvard professors. Yet, this past weekend’s Disney movie, “Ice...

Don't look now, but it appears that the teaching of economics is becoming illegal on the campuses of America. That is the only logical conclusion one can reach after studying the treatment of Harvard president Lawrence Summers and his fellow economist, University of Nevada- Las Vegas professor Hans-Herman Hoppe. Summers was recently condemned by a majority vote of the Harvard faculty for raising questions about gender differences that apparently cannot be raised on campus today. But the Hoppe case offers a better illustration of the parlous nature of academic freedom in America

The high drama of Tuesday's no-confidence vote in Harvard University president Lawrence H. Summers has left the faculty bewildered. The move was not only a surprise to almost everyone on campus, but virtually unprecedented at a major research university, so there is no blueprint for what happens next. ''Many of us are confused at this point," said historian Charles S. Maier. ''It's not a parliamentary system," in which a vote of no confidence would bring down the government, so ''you don't know what consequences arise from the vote." The regular administrative business of the university has slowed as professors ponder...

As the just-resigned president of the University of Colorado said, there’s a “new McCarthyism” alive in America. But it’s hardly what was gnawing at her. Her expressed fear was that critics of Ward Churchill, a professor of sorts at her institution, now feel “empowered.” Wow. Churchill, in case you forgot, is the guy who as much as said that all of those killed in the Pentagon and most of those killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11 had it coming. He hates America. He advocates violence or whatever it takes to change things. He seems to have received tenure...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Embattled Harvard President Lawrence Summers braced for another contentious faculty meeting Tuesday, with debate planned on two motions -- one a vote of no-confidence, the other a milder rebuke for his management style and comments about women in science. Neither item would carry any official weight.

Lawrence Summers, I feel your pain. The sad truth about a society that becomes increasingly politicized by the day is that the principal victim is integrity. Thoughtfulness and honesty count for less and less and appearances count for more and more. Summers, president of Harvard, speaking informally at an economics conference dealing with diversity, suggested that one possible reason for fewer women on science and engineering faculties may be less inherent ability in women to perform at the highest levels of these fields. Is this possible? Yes. Can you say this at a university? Apparently not. Summers' remarks provoked a...

Some may say it’s nothing to laugh about but I can’t help but find humor when the snobs of the academic elite find themselves mired in paradoxical hypocrisy. One can almost smell the heat from their cerebral wheels, the publicly funded oil burning away, as they try to come up with an explanation of why they are between such a rock and a hard place. It reminds me of the old Bill Cosby bit about the student who asked his Catholic teacher the hypothetical question, “Father, if God can do anything, can He Himself make a rock so big that...

Map reading and parking may prove difficult for some women because they were exposed to too little testosterone in the womb, researchers suggest. The study, in the journal Intelligence, fuels the age-old male myth that women are deficient in these skills. Scientists from the University of Giessen, Germany, found a lack of the hormone affects spatial ability. Low testosterone levels are also linked to shorter wedding ring fingers, they say. The research looked at the spatial, numerical and verbal skills of 40 student volunteers. Spatial skill is the ability to assess and orientate shapes and spaces. Map reading and parking...

Harvard President Lawrence Summers said Wednesday in a statement on the school's Web site that he regretted not considering more carefully his remarks last week suggesting innate differences between the sexes could account for why fewer women succeed in science and math careers. "Despite reports to the contrary, I did not say, nor do I believe, that girls are intellectually less able than boys, or that women lack the ability to succeed at the highest levels of science," Summers said on the Web site. However, he wrote, "I was wrong to have spoken in a way that was an unintended...

When does anti-Zionism cross the line into anti-Semitism? That is a question roiling college and university campuses across the world. Harvard's President Lawrence Summers helped to stimulate constructive debate about this issue when he urged students and professors to challenge "vigorously" Israeli policies with which they disagree, but he condemned as "anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent" calls to single out only Israel for such extreme sanctions as divestment and boycott. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman joined this debate by writing that "Criticizing Israel is not anti-Semitic, and saying so is vile. But singling out Israel for...

When does anti-Zionism cross the line into anti-Semitism? That is a question roiling college and university campuses across the world. Harvard's President Lawrence Summers helped to stimulate constructive debate about this issue when he urged students and professors to challenge "vigorously" Israeli policies with which they disagree, but he condemned as "anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent" calls to single out only Israel for such extreme sanctions as divestment and boycott. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman joined this debate by writing that "Criticizing Israel is not anti-Semitic, and saying so is vile. But singling out Israel for...

Summers wants Harvard to regard itself as a single sovereign entity rather than as an archipelago of loosely affiliated institutions. He wants to change the undergraduate curriculum so that students focus less on ''ways of knowing'' and more on actual knowledge. He wants to raise quantitative kinds of knowledge to something like parity with traditionally humanistic kinds of knowledge. He wants to make the university more directly engaged with problems in education and public health, and he wants the professions that deal with those problems to achieve the same status as the more lordly ones of law, business and medicine....

Henry Kissinger, former US secretary of state, and Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary, were named on Monday to head a taskforce to find ways to repair the fractured relationship between the US and Europe. The Council on Foreign Relations group will examine the state of US policy towards Europe at a time when the transatlantic alliance has been shaken by disagreements between the US, France and Germany over the war in Iraq. Both sides have tried to play down the divisions since the war began, and French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin said on Monday that "it is useless...

Americans are becoming only too aware of the financial tricks and deceit in which some of the nation's largest and most respected corporations engaged during the Clinton administration to pump up stock prices with fraudulently inflated profits. When the huge bubble no longer could be sustained the men and women at the top would bail out of their stock and pocket millions, leaving pensioners and other investors holding an empty bag. To market insiders these are known as "pump and dumps." While federal investigators are looking into the corporate malfeasance at Enron, WorldCom, Qwest Communications, AOL Time Warner and...