<p>If you have the time, try reading this article, kinda puts this whole thing in perspective. </p>
<p>Kinda puts this whole thing in somebodys perspective anyway. I think the article does make some interesting points, though I would take issue with some of it as well.</p>
<p>What I find most fascinating, however, is that the author (Rachel Donadio) is the same person who lambasted Naomi Wolf, in a New York Observer article last year, after Wolf accused noted Yale professor Harold Bloom of sexual harassment. Donadio is herself a Yale alum and former Bloom student. Just shows how incestuous the Ivy world is.</p>
<p>"In some ways, [the current fussing] recalls the campus turmoil of the 1960's. Only this time around, the protesters aren't the undergraduates; they're the faculty, who to some extent remain immersed in the values and pieties of the 60's and are clashing with a president intent on bringing Harvard in line with today's political and economic realities. What's happening at Harvard goes far beyond Summers's personality; instead, it's about larger social and political transformations to which the academy - essentially a conservative institution made up of thousands of progressive minds - is deeply resistant."</p>
<p>Not so hard to understand, really. Today's faculty lions are the 60's student radicals "grown up." I use the latter term advisedly, because many of them have never grown up, and are the same shallow, self-absorbed snots they were as undergraduates. The only difference is that they have spent an additional 30-40 years talking to no one except those who share their own prejudices, and are even more insufferable than they were as college students.</p>
<p>The writer's analysis matches exactly the cynical view I have taken from the outset of this dust-up: it has precisely ZERO to do with the scientific potential of females, and EVERYTHING to do with a perceived threat to comfortable lives of tenured senior faculty.</p>