Instapundit linked to an article about Harvard President Larry Summers. After reading it, I'm more confused than before.
Sarah Bahan, 22, was wistful as she left the meeting. She had kind words to say about Summers' emphasis on hard sciences.
So his questioning of different aptitudes among men and women wasn't part of a master plan to keep all the female students out of hard science programs?
"This is a sort of 'I'm-not-a-feminist-but' generation," said J. Lorand Matory, a professor of anthropology and of African and African American studies. "I don't know if the word is 'conservative' as much as 'careerist.' "
That quotation made my head hurt. Is being a feminist antithetical to being a careerist? Are you a 'careerist' if you want to succeed on your talents rather than on filling some quotia? Or is that 'conservative'?
I bet I would understand the nuance here if I had gone to Harvard.
To Matory, the African American studies professor, it was no surprise that students were not calling to oust Summers. Students rarely have occasion to interact with a university president, he said, and tend not to follow internal faculty politics.
"If anything," Matory said, "the vast number of students don't care."
Students are there for an education, not to get involved with disputes between the faculty and the president.
Harry Lewis, a computer science professor and former dean of Harvard College who left under pressure from Summers, said campus politics here had been shifting for decades, as more students from less affluent backgrounds enrolled.
A more diverse group, they are also "eager to prosper and less willing to take risks by rebelling," Lewis said. His upcoming book, "Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education," traces what he considers to be the decline in the quality of education at Harvard. It's left them far more likely to support the power structure, he said.
"The Harvard student body looks more like America than the Harvard faculty," he said. "That's what's happened."
If only Harvard had limited enrollment to the affluent and not let in those "other people".
The quotations from the faculty (or former faculty) and the ones from the students sound as though they are talking about two different people. The students are pleased because Summers put their interests first. The faculty is displeased because he didn't put their wants first.
One of these two groups has forgotten who is paying whom.
Posted by marybeth at February 24, 2006 01:51 PM News