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Harvard’s own Winston Smith
Heather Mac Donald has a powerful article at City Journal on the unbelievable $50 million diversity proposal that Harvard president Lawrence Summers commissioned and now supports. Mac Donald points out something that Summers said back in February which took him even further into intellectual disgrace than I had realized:
In one of his many groveling apologies for the “wounds” he had inflicted on delicate faculty sensibilities, he parrots the most left-wing, radical tenet of feminist constructivist ideology: that traditional standards of merit are merely white male ploys to silence female and minority “voices.” The “underlying … fact” of universities, he told the faculty at a February 15 meeting, is that they were “originally designed by men and for men.” In Summers’s view, the male origin of universities undermines any claim they might make to using objective tests of merit. “That reality [of a male founding],” he said, “shapes everything from … assumptions about effectiveness in teaching and mentoring, to concepts of excellence.” In other words, there is a male “concept of excellence” in genome research, say, that may not be the same as a female or black “concept of excellence” in genome research.Summers’s submission to the hard left’s view of reality proves once again the adage that any institution or person not consciously conservative, inevitably turns liberal over time. A conservative-leaning liberal, Summers made an ill-thought-out feint in the direction of non-liberal truth about cognitive differences between men and women. But then, after being ferociously attacked for this amazing indiscretion, and having no consciously non-liberal principles in his make-up with which to resist the attack, he ended by subscribing completely to the leftist orthodoxy. This conversion, it seems to me, was partly sincere (for example, Summers really seemed to be going through some kind of “consciousness expansion” about the tough time women supposedly face in the sciences) and partly forced (by the unceasing wave of furious vituperation coming at him from his own faculty and by the growing threat that he might actually lose his job). To grasp the psychological essence of this conversion, see the last page of Nineteen Eight-Four, where the broken, ruined Winston Smith, having been tortured by O’Brien and having betrayed his mistress Julia, realizes, with sentimental tears running down his cheek, that “he loved Big Brother.” What other course could Summers have taken, once he got into this hot water? There were three honorable things he could have done. 1. He could have defended his position about women’s cognitive capacities in the sciences and his right to raise the issue, and either won the battle for truth and for freedom of discourse, or gone down fighting. 2. He could have resigned rather than subscribing to this atrocious diversity plan. 3. Having subscribed to the diversity plan, he could have killed himself in shame. He did none of these things. Instead he turned himself into the most shameful patsy to the academic left that anyone has ever seen, a by-word for cowardly self-abasement. One does not wish to be unkind, but how, in the future, will anyone, whether on the right or the left, be able look at Summers with anything other than contempt?
Yet all is not lost. While the Summers imbroglio represents the most spectacular instance of political correctness ever and a great victory for the dominant academic left, at the same time, the incident has carried the academic left to such a risible extreme that one has trouble imagining that it can survive much longer, at least in its current form. Email entry |