Harvard President Larry Summers did what most guys do when they have offended the ladies–he went out and bought a nice prezzy.
But Larry had made the feminists very angry by suggesting men and women have different cognitive skills, and so he couldn’t just buy a necklace or handbag.
Larry had to earmark $50 million to promote “diversity” at Harvard, which, according to the City Journal’s Heather Mac Donald, is a colossal waste of money.
Mac Donald notes:
“The university would have been better off hiring a top-notch conjuror, since only magic could produce a trove of previously undiscovered female and minority academic stars suitable for tenuring….
“Even Harvard’s bottomless resources cannot buy a miracle, however. So instead of a magician, the university has brought forth the next best thing: a report on ’diversity’ that, like all such products, possesses the power of shutting down every critical faculty in seemingly intelligent people. For connoisseurs of diversity claptrap, Harvard’s just released ’Report of the Task Force on Women Faculty’ is a thing of beauty, a peerless example of the destruction of higher learning by identity politics. Because the report will undoubtedly serve as the template for future diversity scams in colleges across the country, it’s worth studying.”
Mc Donald explains why such diversity efforts are doomed to failure:
“Every such ’diversity’ initiative immediately faces two major obstacles. First, its purpose is to recommend the identical set of actions that the institution, whether academic or corporate, has already been doing. Every college in the country has been frantically pursing ’diversity’ in hiring and admissions for decades. The task force itself commends the diversity policies of 17 rival colleges–the mere tip of the iceberg–without drawing the obvious conclusion.
“The second obstacle follows from the first: there is nothing more that can be done. If untapped pools of highly qualified female and minority candidates existed out there, schools would have snapped them up long ago–if not your college, then its dozens of competitors, just as desperate to placate the quota gods. (The one course of action that might, in the case of black and Hispanic faculty recruitment, bear long-term results is the one that elite college personnel are least likely to choose: intensive mentoring of young students and the jettisoning of all ’progressive’ pedagogy in the schools.)”
Read the whole piece to find out what tricks the diversicrats will use to hide their failure from the public.