The Larry Summers tragicomedy continues. In today’s episode, we watch as Harvard’s hapless president is once again humiliated by the faculty of Arts and Sciences, which met yesterday and returned a vote of no confidence by a margin of 218 to 185, with 18 abstentions.
It’s a bit like one of those Warner Brothers cartoons in which some pathetic character--Elmer Fudd comes to mind--goes after the waskily wabbit only to be outtwitted or at least outmaneuvered by the time the commercial break rolls around. Same thing happens in every episode, but the very predictability of the scenario adds to the comedy of the consummation. Why aren’t the girls more widely represented at the highest levels of science and mathematics? Why?
This of course was the question which catapulted Elmer--I mean President Summers--to his current notoriety. It’s an interesting if also, in the current politically correct environment, an unaskable question. Why is it unaskable? Well, let’s see. That there are fewer women in those positions is indubitable, even if it is impolite to mention the fact. But how can that be? For the last three decades, and especially in the last two decades, every college and university whose administrators can pronounce the phrase "affirmative action" has been scouring the world for girls who aren’t actually brain dead and have showered them with any job their little hearts desire. Jobs traditionally the preserve of males--engineering, say--were especially open to "talent," i.e., people of the right, i.e., the female sex. So where are the female Einsteins and Freges and Hertzes and Bohrs? Where are the female Darwins and Mendels and Faradays? Where are the female . . . "Marie Curie, don’t forget about Marie Curie, and . . . and . . . and . . . , well don’t forget about Marie Curie." OK, I won’t. But Larry Summers embarrassed his oh-so-sensitive faculty with his well-meant but bumbling raising of the issue and so he must suffer ritual humiliation and expulsion from the tribe. So his faculty returns a vote of no confidence.
In an earlier reflection on Larry Summers, I pointed out the pertinence of Ralph Buchsbaum’s zoological classic Animals Without Backbones to phenomenon of Larry Summers. But of course the backbone is not the only anatomical feature that the President of Harvard (in company, it must be said, with most other college administrators) is missing. There is also the obvious lack of what the Spanish call cojones. It is an interesting question whether this organ is magically returned to college presidents when they leave office. Larry Summers may soon be able to tell us.
But not yet. For immediately after the vote of no confidence, the Harvard Corporation reaffirmed its faith in Elmer, at least for the time being. And why not? "Dr. Summers," as The New York Times decorously addressed the besieged administrator, came out and abased himself yet again in public: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa: "At a statement released after the meeting, Dr. Summers said he had done his best `to hear all that has been said, to think hard, to learn and to adjust.’" Adjust? That’s "adjust" as in c-a-p-i-t-u-l-a-t-e.
The Times, of course, has been loving the Larry Summers Show. Today they penned what is probably the funniest (albeit inadvertently funny) sentence I have read all week.
At an intense and sober meeting, Dr. Summers’s supporters accused his opponents of political correctness while his critics emphasized that their concerns had nothing to do with political correctness but were about Dr. Summers’s leadership, as well as his remarks concerning a lack of women in science.Have you got that, mes amis? The "concerns" voiced by Elmer’s critics have nothing to do with political correctness: on the contrary, they have to do with political correctness (viz, "his remarks concerning a lack of women in science.") Speaking for myself, I prefer it when the Times settles for bald contradiction rather than its usual hand-wringing evasiveness. It is a refreshing--you might even say "manly"--change.
The great puzzle in this academic farce revolves around the question of motivation: what does Larry Summers think he is doing? I don’t know the answer to that, but when I mentioned the vote of no confidence to a friend this morning he observed that Summers seemed to be trying to "win the battle by surrendering." That’s it in a nutshell, I suspect. But of course one doesn’t win by surrendering, one merely humiliates oneself and betrays the cause one pretends to be serving. That’s the tragic element in the tragicomic farce.
add a comment