Larry, We Hardly Knew Ye

The Times of London runs a post-mortem on the short-lived presidency of Lawrence Summers at Harvard Univeristy. Actually, it doesn't seem that short; more like a slow-motion firing squad.

Other than President Summers' intemperate comments about women in the sciences, I really didn't know much about him despite the fact that a large swath of his government career overlapped (in time, not distinction) with my own. As portrayed in the Times he seems a very unlikely choice for a university president, much less the leader of Harvard. In one very amusing story he seems to have dropped a chicken wing into the cuff of his trousers during a diplomatic reception and walked around the remainder of the evening with the snack appended to his leg. A barbarian at the gate, to be sure.

For reasons that I have never explored in depth, the topic of liberal academic intolerance is one of endless fascination to me. How can people and institutions so committed to a diversity of views be so closed at the same time? And how, HOW can they not understand just how constricted their views are? How can people who spend a good deal of their time denigrating the oppressive authoritarianism of, say, the Roman Catholic Church, not understand that by comparison with academia, the Church is a veritable free-for-all?

Tis a mystery, isn't it? The power of self-deception truly is boundless.