<p>Not fully repenting, but having doubts ...</p>
<p>Even as the puritan judges concluded they acted hastily in the Salem witch trials:</p>
<p>From editorial:</p>
<p>"The Harvard Corporation, a board currently composed of six men and one woman, is the ultimate authority within the university. James R. Houghton, its senior member, affirmed its confidence in Summers this week.</p>
<p>The corporation selected Summers because he was an assertive academic not afraid to offend power centers within the university in pursuit of his and the corporation's agenda. This includes improving undergraduate education, enhancing the role of the life sciences, and moving a substantial portion of the university's academic activities to Allston."</p>
<p>From Sam Allis column:</p>
<p>After a very public dust-up with former Harvard professor Cornel West, who left in 2002 to hang his hat at Princeton, Summers is now receiving incoming from people livid at his recent suggestion that, as a gender, women may be inherently less equipped to excel at science than men. And at a faculty meeting with him last week, members of both sexes let fly at his czarist proclivities.</p>
<p>My first reaction to all this is, yep, that's Larry. My second is the man must be doing something right. Let's start with West. All the academic types I've talked to, to the best of their understanding, agree privately with Summers that West was not performing at the level a university professor should.</p>
<p>How Summers handled the situation is another matter. Like Conan the Barbarian, his interpersonal skills are modest. But the Harvard corporation knew this when it hired him. Summers had been Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin's attack dog in Washington. After a decade of soft leadership from Neil Rudenstine, the corporation wanted a breaker of china.</p>
<p>And the torrent of distemper flowing in reaction to his comments on women and science merely confirms the broad reservoir of political correctness on our nation's elite campuses. Regardless of how you feel about the subject -- and no one I'm aware of has cornered the market on the truth -- that a president of Harvard cannot broach the subject without being savaged is scary.</p>
<p>Letter from 6 women from the Class of 1980:</p>
<p>WE ARE women from the Harvard College Class of 1980. We first met Harvard President Lawrence Summers when we were undergraduates and he was a graduate student and resident economics tutor in Lowell House.</p>
<p>Harvard could be a somewhat daunting place for many students, and particularly for women, in those days. Our class was 60 percent men, and there was a larger contingent of legatees than there is today. Larry was for some of us an Economics 10 section leader, for others an informal economics tutor, and a friend and adviser to each of us. He encouraged us all to perform at the highest levels in our academic work. He took our comments and arguments seriously, and treated each of us with the greatest respect. He fostered in us an appreciation for logical thought, intellectual honesty, and scientific rigor in analyzing issues. Perhaps most important, he urged us to have confidence in our abilities. He never made the slightest distinction between us and our male peers.</p>
<p>In addition, Larry has been a friend to us throughout our careers, often providing support, encouragement, and wise counsel.</p>