Harvard Prof Harvey Mansfield, who will be talking about his new book, “Manliness,” in Washington on March 15 (at an event sponsored by the IWF and Hudson Institute), has words for departing Harvard President Larry Summers.


According to a piece in the Wall Street Journal, the words are: 


“Defend yourself.” That’s the lesson Harvey Mansfield drew for Larry Summers the week before Harvard’s president was forced to resign. Mr. Mansfield, a 73-year-old government professor and conservative elder statesman of the university, went on to suggest that Mr. Summers’s capitulation to those he offended (when he said women might be biologically less inclined to succeed in the hard sciences) is not simply a craven kowtow to political correctness, but proof, also, of a character flaw. Indeed, Mr. Mansfield continued with a mischievous smile, ‘He has apologized so much that he looks unmanly.'”


Camille Paglia said pretty much the same thing-only she called Mr. Summers a rag doll rather than unmanly. She wrote:


“His stellar early career as an economics professor did not prepare him for dealing with an ingrown humanities faculty that has been sunk in political correctness for decades. As president, he had a duty to research the tribal creeds and customs of those he wished to convert. Foolishly thinking plain speech and common sense would suffice, he flunked Academic Anthropology 101.


“While many issues are rumored to have played a role in Mr. Summers’s resignation (including charges of favoritism in a messy legal case involving foreign investments), the controversy that will inevitably symbolize his presidency was the manufactured outcry early last year over his glancing reference at a conference to possible innate differences between the sexes in aptitude for science and math. The feminist pressure groups rose en masse from their lavishly feathered nests and set up a furious cackle that led to a 218-to-185 vote of no confidence by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences last March.


“Instead of welcoming this golden opportunity to introduce the forbidden subject of biology to academic gender studies (where a rigid dogma of social constructionism reigns), Mr. Summers collapsed like a rag doll.”