Saturday, June 04, 2005

I'm Back! So Let's Fire Lawrence Summers

Harvard President Lawrence Summers has shown himself to be a most vile creature, for whom no lie is too big to tell, no quailing or bootlicking too low to stoop to, and no principle too personally valuable to jettison, to ensure his continuance in his highly-compensated sinecure.

The details are here, in Heather Mac Donald's marvelous indictment of both Summers and the sickeningly stupid and poisonously ruinous politics of group identity that he now worships and throws others' money at -- 50 million smackeroos, at that -- to save his own job.

Summers should be fired for many reasons: his de facto demolition of academic freedom, his kowtowing to a moronic and rabid element that threatens both his institution and our society as a whole, and his squandering of university funds for his own benefit. But mostly because he has shown his true colors as a liar, fraud, mountebank, and lickspittle. His kind ought to have no place in an institution that ostensibly would like to regain its former prestige, rather than hastening its descent into a laughable parady of a place of learning and culture.