Posted on 09/21/2007 7:07:39 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
WASHINGTON -- The latest smack-down of former Harvard President Lawrence Summers should extinguish any remaining doubt that political correctness is the new McCarthyism.
Summers, you'll recall, was driven out of his university post in 2005 after he suggested at a conference that gender differences might account for an underrepresentation by women in science, math and engineering.
Never mind that scientific evidence suggests as much. One simply doesn't say -- ever -- that men and women aren't equal in every way.
Summers' remarks were seized upon, taken out of context and misinterpreted by many, including one female biologist from MIT, who walked out on the president's talk, later saying that she felt she was either going to faint or throw up.
And we say there's no difference between men and women? Can you imagine a man bolting from the room with light head and upset tummy if a woman college president suggested that genetic differences might account for males lagging behind females in reading and writing?
Men, being the logical, bemused fellows that they mostly are, would probably say, "Hear, hear!" -- and wonder how much longer before lunch. Stomping out of the room in a tizzy is not in the adult male repertoire. (Could it be genes?)
For thinking improper thoughts, Summers the Blasphemer was banished into the outer darkness. There's no debating that he was punished for saying something that made a special group feel bad -- the new blacklisting offense. To be called a sexist, racist or homophobe today is tantamount to being a communist sympathizer 50-60 years ago.
Fast-forward to this month. Summers was scheduled to be the keynote speaker at the University of California Board of Regents bimonthly board meeting.
And then he wasn't.
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearpolitics.com ...
It’s amazing, not really, how liberals will slam Summers but embrace Ahmadnutjob.
My favorite response to Larry Summer considering studying a difference between men and woman was the woman who said she was so sickened by the thought of such a study that she almost passed out. Kind of proves the point of such a study, doesn’t it?
LIBERALISM run amuck. I just pray that parents think twice about what colleges they choose to send their kids to -— the selection of real, apolitical, non-liberal-infested institutions is gettting very limited now.
He won’t be in Hillary’s administration, unless he knows how to sweep floors and clean toilets.
Let's not forget "man-made global warming denier".
Psychological lynching, that is what this is. Technically, Larry Summers is still living and breathing, but he has become an ‘unperson’, present but of no account. All those hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on his behalf, in getting him educated and awarding him a salary for years, only to be flushed away in a minute by a few intemperate remarks before a crowd not disposed to hear anything but the most absolute orthodoxy.
For those who do not believe in the conventional wisdom about the existence in an afterlife, in which the sins and triumphs of a life are weighed and judgment pronounced accordingly, the punishment just has to be carried out here, in the name of the peer group.
this makes McCarthyism sound like a bad thing.....
Let’s not get carried away. Summers is hardly unemployed. He remains on the Harvard faculty and works part time for hedge fund manager D.E. Shaw. Summers apparently had an abrasive management style, such that by the time he uttered these comments, there was already an unusually large chunk of the Harvard community that actively disliked him. I think that was really the deciding factor in his departure. The gender comments just provided a convenient rallying point.
Timothy Leary must have buried massive LSD cannisters all
over that place that are still dosing the population.
Summers is a liberal who has been (figuratively) mugged. He’ll probably become the next David Horowitz.
He made enemies at Harvard before The Incident by telling the African-American Studies Department to get back to academics and stop doing rap albums, almost a direct attack on Cornel West (who’s a fraud IMO), who left for Princeton (and Princeton’s loss was Harvard’s gain!). There were some other run-ins with the hyper-sensitive and overly PC Harvard faculty. He actually wanted them to do some teaching....
I heard Columbia didn’t allow Summers to speak. If that is so, amazing.
They disrespect a man because he makes a comment that, if twisted, may imply a difference between men and women, but allow a man to speak who passes laws that everyday women have to walk around covered in sheets.
Hypocrisy, thy name is Columbia.
bump
Somebody should spoof the visiting-speaker program at Columbia University...
with a phoned-in offer of an un-compensated speech by Larry Summers.
That would result in a great “Rohrshach” (sp?) test revealing the vile
soul of American academia...
...Columbia willing to give a forum to a Terrorist-President
but declining to invite a leading light of The Clinton Administration.
American universities and DNC are the last bastions of Stalinism.
Pray for W and Our Troops
And, it shouldn’t go unmentioned supports the use of stoning to kill women.
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