Varia

Journalists do get the best obits, and late Boston Globe columnist David Nyhan was fondly remembered this week at the paper.

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George Will is must-reading on the Larry Summers brouhaha at Harvard, and Ruth Marcus is good, too.

The Financial Times' Amity Shlaes advises Mr. Summers: Stop apologizing. At Slate, William Saletan criticizes the "pseudo-feminist show-trial" of the Harvard president.

The NY Times, meantime, reports on faculty dissatisfaction with a president they say has created ill will by "humiliating faculty members in meetings, shutting down debate and dominating discussions."

I particularly like this excerpt: "Larry is stimulating to argue with one on one and would be admirably controversial as a colleague," said Daniel S. Fisher, a Harvard professor of physics and applied physics, who has observed Mr. Summers in many meetings. "But with Larry as president, the rules are clear. For the president, it is fine to be provocative, but for faculty, serious questions and constructive dissent are squelched."

Serious questions and constructive dissent are squelched? Considering the reaction to Summers' breach of PC group-think, and the Harvard president's repeated forced apologies, one wonders: Who exactly is doing the squelching, and who is the squelchee?

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Mencken on the 'gogues:

The truth is that the average schoolmaster, on all the lower levels, is and always must be...next door to an idiot, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation?

The essential difficulty of pedagogy lies in the impossibility of inducing a sufficiency of superior men and women to become pedagogues. Children, and especially boys, have sharp eyes for the weaknesses of the adults set over them. It is impossible to make boys take seriously the teaching of men they hold in contempt.

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Hamilton College outdoes itself, downshifting past moral vacuity to willful and grotesque offensiveness in the guise of "fostering different points of view." Roger Kimball takes note.

To echo Mr. P: How [can] anybody…really, truly be a modern liberal [?] You just can't go around doing real, constructive good without a concept of what Good is.