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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (93819)	1/3/2002 10:49:05 AM
From: JHP	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

i found this amusing! Inside Larry Summers's brain By Alex Beam, Globe Staff, 1/3/2002 I can't believe this is happening. Fifteen months ago I was running the world economy, comparing fashion notes with classy central bankers such as Laurent Fabius and Wim Duisenberg. (They were right about double-breasted; it's not right for the full-figured man.) Now I'm ducking Jesse Jackson's phone calls and praying that Al Sharpton doesn't hop on the shuttle to Boston and stage a hunger strike on the steps of Massachusetts Hall. Why is everyone piling on? It all started when I called in this guy West - ''Brother Cornel'' to his doctorate-totin' homies; can you believe he called me ''Brother Summers'' in the Crimson? Where was I? Oh, yes. So I call in West, who's teaching this 585-student circus called Afro-American Studies 10, and I suggest - very delicately - that Professor West might enforce some academic standards here at the World's Greatest University instead of lollygagging around Sacramento cutting rap records, or managing the presidential campaign of ''Brother Al.'' (What does Sharpton want to be president of, anyway? Def Jam Records? I digress.) So I'm suggesting to Cornel maybe a little more W.E.B. DuBois and a little less of da boyz. Well, that doesn't go down at all. The next thing I know, Brother Skip and Brother Charles are mau-mauing me, claiming that I'm wobbly on diversity and affirmative action here at WGU. Who are these guys? The Spin Brothers? It's chilling to think that I - the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy at age 32 - should be taking guff from the likes of Henry L. ''Skip class to schmooze with Tina Brown'' Gates. Isn't he busy enough ''editing'' that slave ''novel'' he claims to have discovered? And who is Charles Ogletree anyway? Last I saw he was yapping to the Jamaican press about their wonderful prison system. (I'm sure that report of the inmate beheading is just Amnesty International propaganda. You know how overreactive they can be.) Suddenly Ogletree's back on the mainland, busting my chops. And they're threatening to troop off to Princeton? My eye! Remember Gates whining about the ''plantation mentality'' at Duke? Raleigh-Durham is Paris compared to southern New Jersey. Out in area code 609, Skip'll be like that Siberian killer in ''The Sopranos'' - lost in the Pine Barrens. I wonder if I could trade them for Paul Krugman and two double-domes to be named later. He's a handful, too. Never mind. Look, I may be a media-obsessed, egomaniacal jerk, but I'm no racist, OK? That memo I wrote for the World Bank about dumping toxic waste in Third World countries is ancient history. I'm running the most diverse campus in America. After all, of the three white men they considered for president here, one of them was from the Midwest. If that isn't diversity, I don't know what is. Where did everything go wrong? Bullying those Mexican banker deadbeats into line back at Treasury was easy compared to this. Down in D.C. they used to call me ''Dr. Elbows.'' Sure, maybe I roughed up a few Internal Revenue Service time servers, but once Bob Rubin put me through Charm School 101, I got the hang of the smiley-face thing. And for a time, it seemed to work. I certainly gulled those tough-as-nails (ha ha) Wall Street Journal reporters in the Washington bureau. After I chatted them up on the plane to the G-7, they would file these stories about how I was running the world. Which, with Clinton trying to lie his way out of the Monica Lewinsky mess, was true. I was the master of the universe. Now they're calling me the mastah of the university. What happened to my honeymoon? There have been a couple of nice moments. The installation ceremony was nice - lots of flowing robes, and everyone bowing and scraping. My ''mainstream values'' speech was pretty well received, outside of the People's Republic of Cambridge, at least. That patriotism stuff worked for the other president, and it worked for me too - for a while. Of course, he's managing a war against bloodthirsty terrorists, and I'm stuck nickle-and-diming Salvadoran janitors - sorry, Miguel, that $18 billion endowment isn't for you - and listening to Sharpton berate me on talk radio. I should have pulled a Geraldo and volunteered for Tora Bora. Where's Osama, I wonder? Is there room for two in that cave? Alex Beam's e-dress is beam@globe.com. This story ran on page D1 of the Boston Globe on 1/3/2002. © Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.