Larry Summers grovels and it’s not pretty
There is no job worth being this dishonest for. Heather MacDonald:
If more women and minority faculty could be had who met Harvard’s standards for Caucasian and Asian males, the university would have hired them years ago. The only way it will achieve increased female and race “diversity” in the foreseeable future is to set a lower standard for female and minority hires. And this President Summers seems prepared to do.
In one of his many groveling apologies for the “wounds” he had inflicted on delicate faculty sensibilities, he parrots the most left-wing, radical tenet of feminist constructivist ideology: that traditional standards of merit are merely white male ploys to silence female and minority “voices.” The “underlying . . . fact” of universities, he told the faculty at a February 15 meeting, is that they were “originally designed by men and for men.” In Summers’s view, the male origin of universities undermines any claim they might make to using objective tests of merit. “That reality [of a male founding],” he said, “shapes everything from . . . assumptions about effectiveness in teaching and mentoring, to concepts of excellence.” In other words, there is a male “concept of excellence” in genome research, say, that may not be the same as a female or black “concept of excellence” in genome research.
The deconstruction of objective standards into race and gender politics is common throughout the humanities. If Summers acts on his embrace of deconstructive relativism—he called on February 15 for “rethinking our assumptions in [such] areas [as ‘excellence’]”—standards in science will be the next to go. Any department that claims that it cannot find qualified candidates to meet the Senior VP for D’s “metrics” could face the charge that it is using white male “concepts of excellence.” Thank you very much, but I think I’ll stick with those “concepts” in the interest of ensuring that my medicine works and the airplane I’m using stays in the air.
We pegged Summers for a coward, unwilling to stand up for common sense because his job was perkful and pretigious, but perhaps we were wrong. Perhaps he really believes this claptrap. So much the worse for him.