It looks like Harvard is going to have a female president. NOW is applauding this as another big step forward for women. They credit, however, Harvard’s former president Larry Summers as the real cause of this appointment:
“NOW is so pleased that Harvard will finally have a female president– and it has only taken them 371 years. Larry Summers, we couldn’t have done it without you,” said NOW President Kim Gandy.
Isn’t it sexist to assume that the reason that Harvard selected Drew Gilpin Faust, the woman rumored to be about to take Harvard’s top slot, is as a payback for Larry Summers? I know nothing about Ms. Faust, and I hope that she is what Harvard needs: someone committed to academic excellence and true diversity of thought. But as a former Harvard grad student, count me as a skeptic.
Harvard is the pinnacle of political correctness, where academic inquiry is low priority compared to furthering “enlightened” liberal causes. Larry Summers (the former Clinton Treasurer Secretary who was considered far too right-wing for good old Harvard) lost his job primarily for daring to question one of the tenets of political correctness: that there are absolutely no differences in the intellectual strengths of men and women. With each year, new research comes out that makes denial of sex differences increasingly ludicrous. But that hasn’t penetrated Harvard. What are the chances that Ms. Faust is going to encourage serious debate and consideration of these types of issues when it is clear that her job would be in jeopardy if she were to stray from the institution’s liberal orthodoxy?
Good luck to Ms. Faust, but I think the university is doomed to continue its slide toward irrelevance.