A friend just sent me this comment from a Summers-loathing Harvard professor (which was also noted on InstaPundit):
The show of student loyalty has come as a surprise to many faculty members and administrators at Harvard, who grew to loathe Summers during a five-year tenure that brought a raw blast of politics to the 370-year-old institution.
….
Harry Lewis, a computer science professor and former dean of Harvard College who left under pressure from Summers, said campus politics here had been shifting for decades, as more students from less affluent backgrounds enrolled.
A more diverse group, they are also “eager to prosper and less willing to take risks by rebelling,” Lewis said. His upcoming book, “Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education,” traces what he considers to be the decline in the quality of education at Harvard. It’s left them far more likely to support the power structure, he said.
“The Harvard student body looks more like America than the Harvard faculty,” he said. “That’s what’s happened.”
Hmm. I seem to recall that not so long ago the sort of people who loathe Summers now used to think that making important institutions “look like America” was a Good Thing.
I guess for them “diversity” has its limits: it’s O.K. to “look like America” so long as you think like me.
Harvard Faculty Questioned
A few days ago I blogged some of the changes that Summers has made in order to increase low-incomed students…
That seems soooo typical of leftist elitism (there is rightist elitism too, of course). All for diversity and so forth just so long as it doesn’t threaten their cozy little world. Sure it’s cute to have blacks in the class and you can even feel good about yourself if you let in the occasional son or daughter of a W. VA coal miner, but they’d just better fit in with your views instead of the views of their hick roots. At least Harry Lewis says it.
I must say, though, I don’t find economists all that bright.