Academic terrorism: The slaying of Larry Summers (Mike Barnicle)
Poor Larry Summers. His problems started months ago when he got pulled over by the gender police at Harvard for a misdemeanor. He was caught talking and thinking out loud at the same time.
Basically, Larry asked the faculty to consider the possibility that men might be better at science and math. Well, the howls were loud and predictable. And the misdemeanor suddenly became a felony.
Quickly, an intellectually intolerant left leaning media joined with a spoiled, pampered, lazy, attention starved element of the faculty to portray Summers as Archie Bunker with a mensa-like ability to do a New York Times crossword puzzle in 60 seconds or less.
By the time this academic-media cartel had carved up Summers' ample arse, he was viewed as a guy who would soon be telling female faculty to skip teaching on days when they had their period. The cartel killed him, turning him into a dead man walking whose every word was used as a weapon to hasten his departure.
In Cairo, fringe fundamentalists offended by cartoons portraying Muhammad as a walking time bomb riot and burn embassies. In Cambridge, they simply hold no-confidence votes among the faculty.
Make no mistake: the Summers slaying was academic terrorism. It was a successful and lethal attack on a guy who made the mistake of believing that Harvard was where ideas - good, bad and stupid - deserved open and on-going discussion.
And it wasn't an ambush either. It was public, frontal and constant. It was led by the equivalence crowd - academic and media - who believe that America is its own worst enemy, the U.S. military ought to be disbanded, people who don't see 'Broke Back Mountain' are homophobic, civil service and SAT scores are racist and Larry Summers - or anyone else - better not ask them to think outside the narrow academic box they've lived in most of their lives.
Here is what a tenured member of the Harvard faculty is required to do in order to earn a paycheck: Wake up and draw a breath.
Here is what they do when they feel threatened by someone asking that they work harder and think more deeply about the life around them: Whine, hold closed meetings, make noise, complain about the boss's temperament and - worst sin of all in Cambridge - hint that he's not inclusive enough.
Summers should have stood up in the furious firefight after his remarks about women and the sciences and told the easily offended professors to shut up, go back to their classrooms and teach. But he wimped out, incorrectly figuring his concession would be viewed as a willingness to co-exist.
It wasn't. Instead, it was a fatal weakness that only encouraged and emboldened his opposition and their allies on various editorial boards.
And if you're keeping score at home, here's a late final from Harvard: Demagoguery just beat debate and it wasn't even close because it was a home game for the winners. |
