Spirit of '68 prevails at Harvard

Alan Dershowitz sees the purge of Larry Summers as a dubious victory for the politically correct:

Now that this plurality of one faculty has succeeded in ousting the president, the most radical elements of Harvard will be emboldened to seek to mold all of Harvard in its image. If they succeed, Harvard will become a less diverse and less interesting institution of learning governed by political-correctness cops of the hard left. This is what happened in many European universities after the violent student protests of the late 1960s. It should not be allowed to happen at Harvard in the wake of the coup d'etat engineered by some in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Stanley Kurtz writes of the politics behind Summers' exit, and posts his own recollection of the World's Greatest University:

I want to emphasize that the level of politically correct intellectual tyranny I encountered at Harvard easily matched, and arguably exceeded, the worst that any other university could offer, even the vaunted University of California at Berkeley. Ah, fair Harvard. You evoke such piquant recollections of intellectual bigotries past.

The lesson Kurtz sees in the Summers fiasco: Appeasing tyrants is a bad idea.