Just a few letters on The Other Charlotte’s and my jeremiads over radical-left academia’s kick in the pants to Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers, a political liberal who made the mistake of supposing out loud that gender imbalances the sciences might possibly not be due entirely to sex discrimination–a capital sin against feminist orthodoxy that cost summers his job (click here for all the links to our screeds and here for my acid thoughts about the Summers docollation in National Review Online, as well as the IWF’s Carrie Lukas’s thoughts about it on Town Hall):
From reader H.M.:
“The thought occurs to me that in all the years I’ve been bringing my cars into garages for servicing, NOT ONCE has my car been serviced by a female mechanic.
“One possibility is that women don’t like messing around with cars as much as men like doing this, or perhaps women just aren’t very good mechanics. But the other possibility — and we need some research here, and fast — is that our country is filled with women mechanics who are being denied jobs because of their sex. My guess is that there’s a fortune in grants money waiting for whoever jumps onto this issue first…It’s ‘The Grease Monkey Gap’–and it’s an outrage.”
I agree–yoo hoo, Gim Gandy!
And our blogstress friend Backyard Conservative turns us on to these words of wisdom from Thomas Sowell:
“Despite incessant repetition of the word ‘diversity’ in academe, the tragic fact is that the academic world is one of the most intolerant places in America when it comes to diversity of ideas. Even the president of Harvard dare not step out of line.
“Parents pay the kind of money on which whole families could live, in order to have their children ‘educated’ at elite academic institutions, hearing only one side of a whole range of issues — race and sex being just two.
“Even if every conclusion with which students are indoctrinated were true, unless those students develop their own ability to weigh opposing arguments, these conclusions will become obsolete as new issues arise in the years ahead. These “educated” people will have developed no ability to analyze opposing sides of issues.
“Students are getting half an education at inflated prices and learning only how to label, dismiss and demonize ideas that differ from what they have been led to believe. Their ‘educated’ ignorance is a danger to the future of this country.”
Yes, how would you feel as a Harvard parent writing out checks of $55,000 a year for tuition and board for your kid to learn fairy tales about evil white male patriarchy?
Finally, here’s J.K., who….can’t keep the Charlottes straight:
“I’m a bit confused on the writings of one of your authors. Is Charlotte Allen formerly known as Charlotte Hays, or do you have a new writer which is not featured in any area of your staff? I”m dying to know, because I’ve been trying to read everything Charlotte has written to gain a full understanding of her to write a paper for my women-in-media class.”
Both of us Charlottes are insanely flattered to be the subjects of a term paper (in a “women-in-media class, no less!)–but we must warn you that we are not a single Charlotte who flits schizophrenically on a daily basis between her identities as “Charlotte Hays,” doyenne of southern funeral cooking, and “Charlotte Allen,” off-and-on Latin teacher and Zappo-head. There are indeed two of us. And we hope that’s not’s one too many Charlottes for that paper of yours.