Winter for Summers

The Washington Post reports that Harvard Prez Larry Summers is stepping down, in spite of the fact that most faculty and students support his continued tenure.

According to one relatively well-known faculty voice:

"It says that one group of faculty managed a coup d'etat not only against Summers but against the whole Harvard community," said Alan M. Dershowitz, longtime law professor at Harvard and a Summers ally. "He is widely supported among students and in the graduate schools."

A sometime Republican chimed in:

David Gergen, an adviser to presidents who now teaches at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, likened the effort to oust Summers to a negative political campaign. "There were people quite determined that he should leave, and they pursued a long campaign to realize this goal," said Gergen, a friend of Summers.

Tuition payers stepped up to the plate as well:

By a 3 to 1 margin, undergraduates polled online by the Harvard Crimson newspaper this week did not think Summers should resign, with only 19 percent supporting his departure.

But, hey, screw the students unless they're against the war, you know?

Dershowitz, with whom we disagree on many matters, is spot-on here. This is yet another chapter in the ongoing saga pitting the Arts and Sciences faculties of American colleges against students, benefactors, intellectual honesty, and America itself. When they scream "free speech," these Marxists basically mean free speech for themselves, an Orwellian bargain that the country has given them a pass on for far too long.

Summers got himself in trouble largely for being, well, an academic. He dared (correctly) to raise the issue of Cornell West's self-aggrandizing behavior and poor scholarship. West departed for Princeton in a snit, which was Princeton's loss and Harvard's gain. And he had the timerity to suggest (not demand) that academia take a closer look into why women were still underrepresented in certain academic disciplines. The mere speculation into this ongoing subject of debate cut into gender feminist dogma and was largely the catalyst that sent Summers scurrying for the exits.

Heck, we don't even particularly like Larry Summers. As a Clintonista, he was one of many contributors to the party-time president who significantly weakened this country's defenses in the 1990s. One would think that ur-liberal Harvard would warmly embrace a guy like this.

But in today's academic circles, credentials, even liberal ones, don't count if leftist dogma is not rigidly adhered to. Frankly, the Spanish Inquisition had nothing on today's academic left. They'd be using pincers, the rack, and the iron maiden on heretics today if they didn't think they'd get a little bit of Abu Ghraib treatment in the press.

It's time for states, boards of trustees, and whomever else holds the purse strings to step up to the plate and start putting the squeeze on the Gramscian brown shirts whose thuggish behavior and ham-handed tactics for keeping free speech and moderate to right-wing professors off faculties, off-campus, and out of the range of debate.

In short, for better or for worse, it is high time to look at the completely corrupt rank and tenure system that has turned the average college humanities department in particular into nothing more than a concentration camp where leftist doctrine is pounded into students 24/7. This is not education. It's Marxist indoctrination, and it's time to bring it to a screeching halt.