Thursday, February 17, 2005
Defending Harvard’s President
I’m not entirely certain, but I think that, as a Dartmouth student, I am supposed to hate Harvard. But the school’s president, Larry Summers, deserves to be defended. In the academy, where megalomaniacal calls for equality wuther incessantly, Summers stuck his neck out in defense of common sense. Maybe, he argued, “innate differences between the sexes could help explain why fewer women succeed in science and math careers.”
The idea of intrinsic differences between men and women horrifies many academicians, for reasons still unclear to me. But just about everyone can agree that they exist. And life would be damn boring if they didn’t. I cannot, for example, sound very pleasant on the telephone. My laundry always ends up with white blobs of soap all over it, and I’ve never made a decent pot of coffee in my life. I can rarely do two things at once. I fail spectacularly at all assays in the fine arts. And I am a social incompetent. Thankfully, I know someone who excels at all of these, but she cannot read a map to save her life. I can, though. Ain’t life grand?
But Summers- the poor guy- was wrung out yesterday by his own employees, as The Crimson reports.
Professor Samwick comes to Summers’ defense in this post.
I am going to suggest that what the faculty have at Harvard is an employment contract, not a social contract, and it is probably one of the most generous such contracts on the entire planet…No, they aren’t.To my understanding of his time at the helm, Larry hasn’t done anything to prevent the Harvard faculty from doing their research and teaching their classes. He has in various contexts challenged them to do a better job of it. He has spent considerable time thinking about the expansion of the faculty… the relocation of parts of the University… and a review of the curriculum.
That Larry is focused on making Harvard the premier research institution of the 21st century seems to be lost on some of his faculty. Consider this quote from one professor who attended the meeting:
“I think that what’s happening is that lots of people in the University think they’ve been singled out for brutal treatment and are discovering that other people have experienced the same thing. People are putting the pieces together,” the professor said.
Brutal? You are just kidding me.
Posted on February 17, 2005 10:10 PM. Permalink 