Harvard Gets a New President
The Compromise Candidate
By blackhedd Posted in Liberals — Comments (7) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Story here. It's Drew Gilpin Faust. Currently a dean at Radcliffe, she wasn't one of the people I was expecting to get the job. According to the Times story, she appears to have been a compromise candidate lacking in big-administration experience. She does have the most important qualification of all, however: she's a female woman.
I don't need to remind everyone why this matters: Harvard is one of a tiny number of institutions that graduate a huge proportion of our business and national leadership. And their endowment is so big and well-managed that people make jokes about it. The fact that the Harvard faculty has become an almost laughable left-wing loony bin does nothing to change that.
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Harvard Gets a New President 7 Comments (0 topical, 7 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
it up any worse than it is.
Envisioning when all that is Left is the Right.
argument by truism, but in this case it would seem relatively appropriate. The nation's preeminent (or a close second) learning institution responds to external criticism that it eschews knowledge in favor of the multiculturalist mantra by appointing someone that seems, by all accounts, to embody said mantra.
While they have a distinguished board of fellows (the Harvard Corporation), the most important power center in the school is the faculty. And the faculty is split into a welter of competing power centers among all the various schools.
For all his ability and accomplishments, Summers was unable to damp out the furor and continue to be effective because the faculty decided they had had enough of him. I have the feeling he could have weathered the external criticism but his real enemies were within.
The Harvard faculty is hard-core left-wing even by comparison with other major university faculties, and you know that's saying something.
It seemed that most of the external coverage of his tenure was quite positive, particularly as regards Cornel West and even his remarks about the fairer sex. For most college campuses, however, what is well-received without is often ill-received within. Post-9/11 even liberals seemed willing to cast a wary eye at the excesses of the academy, but the more vocal the Angry Left becomes the more such criticism is assailed as McCarthyism or worse.
I thought that after Harvard fired that cryptofascist, capitalist, chauvinist, mysogynist pig they'd come to their senses and bring a Hispanic or an African in to be the Presidente. Instead, they settled for a woman. What a letdown.
Drew Gilpin Faust
The name alone is enough to steer clear of this place.
Rochester, Minnesota: A Fem_Leftist City!
The extreme left wing forces of radical feminism have won a big victory with this appointment. They are emboldened by how events have unfolded since Larry Summers' remark. Free speech is a little less free.