JOLLY DAYS

Pushed out

Camille Paglia is somewhat subdued in the decorous pages of the NYT. Her op-ed point seems to be that now is the time for Harvard to rethink its humanities education. Not exactly a revolutionary idea, but along the way she is up to her old standards of telling it like it is. Her comments about Larry Summers being driven out of Harvard by an entrenched politically correct academic clique hits the nail on the head:

…The feminist pressure groups rose en masse from their lavishly feathered nests and set up a furious cackle that led to a 218-to-185 vote of no confidence by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences last March.

Instead of welcoming this golden opportunity to introduce the forbidden subject of biology to academic gender studies (where a rigid dogma of social constructionism reigns), Mr. Summers collapsed like a rag doll. A few months later, after issuing one abject apology after another, he threw $50 million at a jerrybuilt program to expand the comfort zone of female scientists and others on campus.