The politically correct faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard passed a surprise no-confidence vote against Larry Summers last night:
Summers’ January remarks — off-the-record, he believed — prompted angry criticism from many faculty, students and alumni; others, however, defended him, saying Summers was simply engaging in a legitimate academic debate.
The criticism quickly expanded into a broader attacks on the president’s allegedly blunt management style and his vision for the university, including major projects to expand Harvard’s campus across the Charles River in Boston, and his ideas about what direction scientific research should take.
J. Lorand Matory, the anthropology professor who introduced the measure, called on Summers to resign.
“There is no noble alternative to resignation,” he said.
Dr. Matory, the motion’s author, is an interesting fellow. He’s a student of cross-dressing, a voodoo expert, a director of the ethnic studies department, an adviser to GLQ, a Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, a great admirer of matriarchy, and an apologist for the corrupt and brutal Nigerian dictator Ibrahim Babangida, about whom he’s writing a sympathetic book:
The next book will be a collaborative effort with my wife, a presidential protocol officer during the rule of Nigerian president Ibrahim Babangida. We have planned it as a culturally sensitive account of the inner workings of the dictatorship that ruled Africa’s largest nation from 1985 to 1993. It is intended both as a corrective to standardized journalistic and political science clichés about the nature of autocracy and corruption in Africa and as a historical study of the genesis of Nigeria’s current political crisis.
Here’s what Nigerians say about Matory’s hero:
In closing, as a nation – we are not faced with many choices in who becomes our president. However, ponderability that Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida is not the best choice is simple. If we seek a nation, which produces leaders that must not be emulated or trusted – then we must allow his choice. If we seek a leader who is not ashamed to live opulently in a grand house where citizens of the nation he governed are reduced to abject poverty – Mr. Babangida must remain our choice. If we seek a commander-in-chief that will once again destroy the team spirit essential to every modern military might – Mr. Babangida must be our choice. If the office of the president is open to a man that would waste funds on political experimentation – our choice must remain Mr. Babangida. If we seek to experience closure of Universities and accelerate brain drain – Mr. Babangida is our choice. However, if our resolute is for a change of direction – we should seek Mr. Babangida to assist the nation to elect a man or woman without his qualities; and one to whom he can serve as an elder statesman or maybe – Kingmaker. And, whilst serving as a Kingmaker – he must promise never to conduct himself as another Balogun of Owu.
What kind of a man supports the presidency of Babangida but not that of Summers?
Not anyone that I’d want educating my children.
UPDATE: Not all Harvard profs are as lame as Dr. VooDoo; see Professor Motl’s blog.
Very useful information, thanks. I will quote you on my physics blog, if you allow. 😉 All the best, Lubos
Let Me Get This Straight
The Colorado University at Boulder faculty have expressed their support for Ward Churchill, who lied about being a Native American, called all but the janitors killed on 9/11 “little Eichmanns”, claimed other’s artwork as his own, and plagiarized the writing of fellow academics.
The Harvard University faculty have expressed no confidence in Lawrence Summers, who said that women might not have as great an aptitude for science and math as men.
So let me get this straight, people actually pay money to attend these asylums?
Has anyone noticed the ironic lesson in this? Mr. Summers tried to appease his fanatic faculty, rather than fight them. And he lost. That’s no surprise to conservatives. Lesson to the left: Appeasement doesn’t work! If these very same professors, let alone their partners in the left-wing media, ever really learned that lesson, they would soon cease being pacifists, now wouldn’t they? Their own actions just proved (albeit, in a different arena) that their own arguments are bunk!
The absolute funniest comment I read about Harvard, Matory, voodoo, and Summers is
here.
Actually, Harvard has no problem with sexism by members of its faculty… as long as it’s the right kind of sexism, of course.
Having spent a little time with Randy Matory (as he’s known on campus), I’ve seen him flare up in fits of rage at Western abuses while expressing at best passing disapproval of non-Western atrocities. While an intellectual freak like any other Harvard professor, his strange bursts of passions reveal a moral compass that is totally off.
“I disagree with what you say but I’ll defend to death your right to say it” Harvard faculty version…. “I disagree with what you have to say AND I’ll destroy you”
Sometimes, Harvard makes me puke…
Umm, the quote from Prof. Matory hardly reads as an apology for President Babangida. Trying to understand the dynamics of Babangida’s dictatorship in a culturally sensitive way is a long way away from apologizing for it. Matory’s book on cross-dressing Yoruba priests is one of the best pieces of Africanist anthropology in recent years, and it’s not clear to me what’s wrong with his being on the editorial board of GLQ. I don’t get what makes him an “admirer of matriarchy,” but is that any worse than being an admirer of patriarchy, which is what President Summers’s apologists seems to be?
C’mon. I’m even more anti-PC and pro Summers than most of you, but you lessen your effect by sniping at the anthropologist for studying Voodoo. Hell’s Bells, that’s like sneering at a biologist for studying fleas (which once cost a colleague of mine one quarter’s research leave).
I find this part of the quote on the Babangida book telling, yusifu: “It is intended … as a corrective to standardized journalistic and political science clichés about the nature of autocracy and corruption in Africa…”
I believe he intends to say Babangida wasn’t such a bad guy, all in all, and this belief is reinforced by the fact that the co-author is a former member of the Babangida junta.
Voodoo may be many things, Mr. Wallace, but science isn’t one of them.
Harvard has degenerated from a university I wanted to attend to a university I’m glad I didn’t attend. The halls are alive with the sound of PC.
The faculty at Harvard may be increasingly PC, but the student body is becoming increasingly business-oriented. It’s essentially aging leftist fossils teaching the next generation of i-bankers, doctors, and lawyers, most of whom are liberal in name only and couldn’t care less about politics outside of economic issues.
My worry is not about the students purely following the PC line given to them, but that they aren’t learning any true right and wrong. Men and women are different. Men are falling behind women in many areas becuase American culture has immasculated them for the past 30 years. The liberal experiment has ended and it failed. I am a recovering liberal. I thought that idealism could win the day. Boy was I wrong! The 1960’s are the greatest curse on America since the lack of faithfulness at Jamestown. Covenant people, it is all about the covenant. Read Winthrop! If we return then there may be hope again.
Kids ought to learn right from wrong from their parents; I pity the poor fool who turns to a burnt-out hippie for moral guidance.