Former Harvard president still dogged by controversy -- even at Tufts

boston.com ^ | March 14, 2007 | Marcella Bombardieri

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MEDFORD -- Nine months after Lawrence H. Summers left the presidency of Harvard University, his very name is enough to stir controversy at nearby Tufts University, where he spoke last night about "rethinking undergraduate education."

Some professors boycotted his appearance, arguing that the former leader -- who has earned condemnation in past years for comments on women in science and for his dealings with African-American professors -- doesn't represent Tufts's values.

While the auditorium was only about 80 percent full, a polite audience of mostly students gave Summers a friendly reception and kept questions to the subject of his talk, instead of past controversies. Summers answered every query, even after the talk was supposed to have ended.

Before the talk, President Lawrence S. Bacow , who invited Summers, said he'd heard complaints from only three professors and no students.

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Provost Sol Gittleman is quoted in the article. WSJ readers will recall that his letters to the editor are regularly published.

[TruthShallSetYouFree]

It's always entertaining when libs eat their own. Summers is actually a good guy. The speech at Harvard that cost him his career was hardly the misogynist rantings of a male chauvinist. Still, he managed to push one of the PC hot buttons.

In that speech, he was musing about the possible reasons that women are under-represented in the field of science at Harvard. He challenged the audience to consider the possibility that innate differences between men and women might account for the fact that men might be more predisposed to succeed in that field.

Of course, the lib women in the audience had a collective cow. They made it sound like Summers was arguing that "men are smarter than women" or some such nonesense. They took bits of his remarks out of context and hung him out to dry.

What I find hilarious about this otherwise sad affair is that the complaining lefty PC lunatics recoil at the notion that there might be genetic differences between men and women. They want to chalk everything up to "socialization."
However, when it comes to another bedrock of the liberal agenda--promoting homosexuality--they are quick to point out that its causes are natural, formed in the womb, and not a result of socialization (and thus its practitioners are to be held blameless.)