<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/17/books/books-harvard.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/17/books/books-harvard.html</a></p>
<p>“In some ways, [the current fussing] recalls the campus turmoil of the 1960’s. Only this time around, the protesters aren’t the undergraduates; they’re the faculty, who to some extent remain immersed in the values and pieties of the 60’s and are clashing with a president intent on bringing Harvard in line with today’s political and economic realities. What’s happening at Harvard goes far beyond Summers’s personality; instead, it’s about larger social and political transformations to which the academy - essentially a conservative institution made up of thousands of progressive minds - is deeply resistant.”</p>
<p>Not so hard to understand, really. Today’s faculty lions are the 60’s student radicals “grown up.” I use the latter term advisedly, because many of them have never grown up, and are the same shallow, self-absorbed snots they were as undergraduates. The only difference is that they have spent an additional 30-40 years talking to no one except those who share their own prejudices, and are even more insufferable than they were as college students.</p>
<p>The writer’s analysis matches exactly the cynical view I have taken from the outset of this dust-up: it has precisely ZERO to do with the scientific potential of females, and EVERYTHING to do with a perceived threat to comfortable lives of tenured senior faculty.</p>