Posted on 09/16/2007 5:14:56 PM PDT by SmithL
Lawrence Summers, the controversial former president of Harvard University, has been replaced as the planned speaker at a UC Board of Regents dinner next week after complaints from faculty members.
"(UC Regents) Chairman Richard Blum and Dr. Summers talked last Thursday and agreed that the regents would have a different speaker," Trey Davis, director of special projects for the UC system, said Saturday.
Davis was unable to say whether a protest letter signed by more than 300 people from the university system had any effect on the decision to find a different speaker for the regents' dinner in Sacramento on Wednesday. He referred those questions to Blum, who is out of the country.
Summers, who was Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, resigned from Harvard last year after a long-running clash with some faculty members over his questioning whether women might not have the same innate ability as men in disciplines such as science, math and engineering. He also had thorny relations with minority faculty members during his time at the university.
While Summers later apologized for his remarks, which he said were misinterpreted, it didn't slow the criticism, which continues to this day.
"I was appalled and stunned that someone like Summers would even be invited to speak to the regents," said UC Davis Professor Maureen Stanton, who helped put together the petition drive. "I think many of us who were involved in the protest believed that it wouldn't reflect well on the university that he even received the invitation."
The petition called Summers' invitation "not only misguided but inappropriate" at a time when the university is working to diversify its community.
"Inviting a keynote speaker who has come to symbolize gender and racial prejudice in academia conveys the wrong message to the University community and to the...
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
No doubt the UC faculty still rants about the horrors of ‘50s anti-Communist blacklisting. So who’s doing the blacklisting these days?
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