"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
Peggy Noonan chimes in on the Larry Summers show trials at Harvard:
But what the Summers story most illustrates is that American universities now seem like Medieval cloisters. They're like a cloister without the messy God part. Old monks of leftism walk their hallowed halls in hooded robes, chanting to themselves. Young nuns of leftist deconstructionism, pale as orchids, walk along wringing their hands, listening to their gloomy music. They become hysterical at the antichrist of a new idea, the instrusion of the reconsideration of settled matter. Get thee behind me, Summers.
These monks and nuns are the worst of both worlds, frightened and so ferocious, antique and so aggressive. Will they exorcise Summers from their midst? Stay tuned. But cheers to the Ivy League students who refuse to be impressed by these relics.
Scoring one for Harvard vis a vis the first 50 names in the Cambridge phonebook, President Summers is credited by a NY Suneditorial for making an observation that is commonsensical to parents but induces vapors among the progressive intelligentsia:
It is not a coincidence that in the remarks on innate gender differences that were so eczematous to the radical professors at Harvard, Mr. Summers spoke of his recent visit to Israel. "There is reasonably strong evidence of taste differences between little girls and little boys that are not easy to attribute to socialization," Mr. Summers said, according to a transcript of his remarks posted on his Harvard Web site. "I just returned from Israel, where we had the opportunity to visit a kibbutz, and to spend some time talking about the history of the kibbutz movement, and it is really very striking to hear how the movement started with an absolute commitment, of a kind one doesn't encounter in other places, that everybody was going to do the same jobs."
The Harvard president went on, "Sometimes the women were going to fix the tractors, and the men were going to work in the nurseries, sometimes the men were going to fix the tractors and the women were going to work in the nurseries, and just under the pressure of what everyone wanted, in a hundred different kibbutzes, each one of which evolved, it all moved in the same direction. So, I think, while I would prefer to believe otherwise, I guess my experience with my two-and-a-half-year-old twin daughters who were not given dolls and who were given trucks, and found themselves saying to each other, 'look, daddy truck is carrying the baby truck,' tells me something."
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Derbyshire makes a very good point regarding the diversity claque's mantra on "institutional barriers":
Larry Summers is in deep doo-doo. He pretty much laid out the entire case against the "diversity" racket. He even included the most telling argument of all, the one that says: "Look, if, as you claim, there is this pool of super-talented people who are being passed over because of 'discrimination,' then why doesn't some academic entrepreneur sweep them all up and create a super-department out of them?" These things must not be said. Once you open these doors, there is no telling where thought will lead you. The diversity business is huge -- just look at its glossy magazine, DIVERSITY INC. It will not be mocked. Summers is toast.
During the days of real Jim Crow, when superlative black players were barred from major league baseball, Bill Veeck actually did plan to create a super-team by buying the Phillies and stocking the team with Negro League stars. Baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a racist of the old school, put the kibosh on the deal that would have broken baseball's color line four years before Jackie Robinson.
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