RedIvy.org

I haven't been blogging for a while, but in the interim, I've written my regular Crimson column on the lessons the next University President can glean from the Decline and Fall of Larry Summers.

There has been a lot of talk about the future of abortion in light of the recent appointments to the Supreme Court and South Dakota's impending abortion ban (expected to be signed by the Republican governor there). I thought I would weigh in because I think there are some eventualities that haven't been fully considered yet that I wanted to discuss.

My gut feeling is that this court is not disposed to overturn Roe v. Wade, although I could be mistaken. I think it is clear that Scalia and Thomas would favor overturning Roe. Alito is likely to side with them, and Roberts probably leans toward it. So there are probably 4 votes against the core principles of Roe. Meanwhile, Souter, Kennedy and Stevens have already declared support for the core principles of Roe in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and Breyer has a history of supporting abortion rights that is weaker but still substantial. He also has a generally liberal temperament. That's 4-4. The remaining justice is Ginsburg. Now, Ginsburg has actually admitted that the case was wrongly decided, but I think when push comes to shove her politics will trump her judicial principle, especially since she seems to see herself as an embattled women's advocate in the post-O'Connor court.

Now, it is possible that the Court will have a change of heart and decide to prove its critics wrong on their charges of legislating from the bench. But I would say it's more likely than not that they will either uphold Roe on a split 5-4 vote, or agree to another "clarification" similar to Planned Parenthood v. Casey that upholds the core ruling of Roe. The reality is that after two conservative nominations from President Bush, we still have a court that tends to the left because the justices replaced were Rehnquist and O'Connor. Bush's nominations only moved the court closer to the center, not to the right.

That said, I think if President Bush gets another appointment and replaces a liberal with a conservative, Roe will be overturned. More importantly, once that happens, I think it will launch a major realignment on the legality of abortion that liberals will not be able to check. The reality is that liberals have been relying more on judicial fiat in their support for abortion rights than the will of American citizens, and they will be completely unable to make the case for a federal law or amendment upholding abortion rights in all 50 states, let alone another Roe. Liberals have been strongly on the defensive on this issue for a decade, and if anything have been de-emphasizing their support for abortion in recent years (c.f. Kerry's distinction between his legal and personal views, abortion groups' emphasis on prevention, etc). The number of legislators who will go on record voting to mandate abortion rights is clearly in the minority. Also, it is hard to feign moral outrage at the declaration that an issue is legislatable, or to create a rallying cry in favor of bringing back an undemocratic mandate.

What will happen if and when Roe is overturned in the more distant future is the issue will go to the states and probably stay there, possibly with additional restrictions passed by a Republican congress and fought over by future congresses, Democratic and Republican. Despite the public's queasiness about abortion, there is not enough support for an amendment banning it entirely, certainly not in the extreme version that pro-lifers will certainly demand (all life protected from conception to natural death). Social conservatives have tended so strongly toward principle over politics that their desire to lump emergency contraception, stem-cell research and euthanasia in the same category as abortion will almost certainly doom their efforts to ban abortion in the medium to long term. Of course, social conservatives could also become more pragmatic, and I won't venture to predict the likelihood of that.

So my advice to pundits trying to predict the future of abortion is "wait and see" because we won't see much until another vacancy opens up in the Court.

***EDIT:

I wanted to add, although I don't believe this Court will overturn Roe, I do believe it will support additional restrictions on abortion, for example the Partial Birth Abortion ban. In this court, on the abortion issue, Kennedy is the swing vote and was part of the dissenting opinion in Stenberg v. Carhart (2000) that wanted to uphold the Partial Birth Abortion ban. So, under this court I believe a ban on Partial Birth Abortion will be upheld.

Also - an article on Justice Kennedy in Wikipedia suggests that I might be underestimating his and Souter's opposition to abortion. It states the following: "It was widely rumored that both Anthony Kennedy and David Souter originally planned on voting to Overturn Roe v. Wade but changed their minds in the eleventh hour after discovering that O'Connor would not."

That said, the article doesn't cite its sources and I can't tell if that's anything more than unfounded rumor.

President Bush is totally correct in defending the proposed takeover of several U.S. ports by Dubai UAE based corporation DP World against congressional Republicans and Democrats. First, we should remember that placing any foreign nation/company (except perhaps a staunch U.S. ally like Britain) in control of activities with significant national security consequences is a risk. It is ridiculous to assume, then, that because of UAE's Arab population it automatically poses a larger security risk than say backwater EU or Asian countries. The critical point is that UAE is not a fundamentalist Arab country with an anti-U.S. stance. For that very reason we obviously wouldn't allow such a port deal with, say, Iran. UAE, however, is quite the opposite. It is one of the U.S.'s greatest allies in the Middle East, allowing us use of military bases and passing on intelligence in the war on terror. To deny them basic rights of commerce is racist and against our own interests.

The International Socialist Organization (ISO) at Columbia University has been harassing a student, Matther Sanchez, a Marine reservist. The harassment began on “activities day” (a day where clubs set up tables with flyers, etc for freshman to check out) last semester when three members of ISO confronted the members of the Columbia Military Society at their table. According to the Columbia Spectator (the Columbia Newspaper):
Sanchez stopped by the table soon after and entered the debate. In the course of the argument, Zill asserted that the military “uses minorities as cannon fodder,” Sanchez said.
“My last name is Sanchez. I’m Puerto Rican. I’m a minority. Zach Zill is blonde and blue-eyed. I said, ‘Look, I’m a minority. I know I enlisted; I don’t feel like I’m being used at all,’” Sanchez said. “[Zill] said, ‘Well, you’re too stupid to know that you’re being used.’”
Mark Xue, CC ’06, a Marine officer candidate and president of the society, was also at the table and confirmed Sanchez’s accusations.
“They were telling him that he was stupid and ignorant, that he was being brainwashed and used for being a minority in the military,” Xue said. “Regardless of what you think about military recruiters, those comments were racially motivated.”
Dols denied any kind of harassment. “It wasn’t personal; it was a debate about the issues,” she said, adding that his harassment complaint was false and “a discrediting campaign against us.”
While this scene may seem appalling, it is not uncommon at Columbia. During the debate last year over whether ROTC should be allowed to return to campus, I remember seeing many flyers literally denouncing our servicemen and praising the Iraqi insurgency. I say, to each his own, it doesn’t bother me if these kids want to call for revolution or take a position that is anti-military. But ISO did not stop there.
Sanchez filed a complaint against the students for what he felt was racially motivated harassment. The university sent Sanchez a letter apologizing for the incident but taking no further action. But ISO did respond. They posted Sanchez’s picture under the headline, “Victim?” juxtaposed with pictures of wounded Iraqi children under the headline, “Victims:”
One of the ISO students, Monique Dols, had this to say (taken from Columbia Spectator):
“People who are protected by policies against racism on campus are groups of people who have historic injustices committed against them,” Dols said. “The idea that you put military personnel who aren’t just enlistees but military personnel who are actively and ideologically engaged in aligning themselves with the U.S. military, which is the most well funded, powerful institution in the world—to put that on the same level as oppressed nationalities, I find offensive.”
Perhaps if Dols had the good fortune of hearing Ward Connerly speak at the Lincoln Day Dinner, she would have known that policies against racism are not to ‘protect’ people who are ‘oppressed nationalities.’ Anti-discrimination policies are to ensure that people are not “judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” (MLK). Calling someone “stupid” and “ignorant” for being a Hispanic man, who joins the military, is racist at worst and condescending and paternalistic at the least. As a veteran who requested and served active duty in the Marine Corps infantry, with many friends still in the service in and in combat zones, I can tell you how offensive it is when radical groups try to school you on who is and who is not “cannon fodder.” I can personally attest to the highest professionalism and restraint by our troops to avoid civilian casualties, even at great personal risk; I can still recite the rules of engagement. You will be hard pressed to find someone to say the same about the Iraqi insurgents and terrorists. To imply willy-nilly that one of our servicemen has hurt children is libelous and despicable.

I encourage you to visit the Spectator articles and form your own opinion; links to the articles are below. I don’t know if these types of soft-bigotry, personal attack and offensive rhetoric should not be allowed, per se, as I am a huge supporter of our first amendment. But if you feel as I do that the actions of the ISO are wholly inappropriate, and that our returning servicemen should be able to get an education without being harassed for their service, then I hope the HRC will stand in solidarity with the students of another Ivy League School, support the Columbia MilVets and join me in condemning the actions of the ISO and calling for Columbia and NY to recognize that our men and women in the armed forces should not be penalized and discriminated against for answering the call to service. For more info and links to the articles visit :
www.geocities.com/friendsofsanchez

For those who support Larry’s departure today, and that is relatively few of you, who do you think we are going to get as a replacement? Someone who is against a women’s center? A more student friendly president? Someone who will use the bully pulpit of the president more?

Stephen’s disclaimer at the beginning of his post is incredible to me. Stephen Said, “he (Larry) was chosen by the Harvard Corporation to be a forceful leader of the entire University, and leadership is the nature of his position. At the very least, and more was possible, he should have used the bully pulpit forcefully.” It was Larry’s lack of bully pulpiting, apparently, that caused all of Stephen’s grievances to occur.

But in reality, it was Larry’s over-use of his bully pulpit that infuriatedhis critics, and ultimately led to his resignation. The Faculty’s central complaint has been that Larry pursued his vision too adamantly and without enough regard for their opinion. Larry tried to push people around and got busted for it. There are a lot of reason’s why Larry should have resigned today, but too argue that this should have happened because Larry didn’t use his bully pulpit forcefully enough is at least a little naïve. Had Larry used it more, he would have been gone sooner, and the administration’s failures about which Stephen validly complained would certainly not have been impeded.

But what really makes the aforementioned complaints unreasonable is that our next president will likely be even weaker than Larry has been. After seeing what happens to a president who tries to use the office like Stephen suggests, no one willing to accept the job will be willing to emulate Larry’s style, much less enhance it. Larry was an imperfect leader who probably made some big mistakes. But the message that his resignation sends is that ego driven faculty can define ourfuture, and if any executive steps out of line with their leftist agenda he’ll be thrown quicker than you can say Ann Coulter is a racist jerk.

So my complaint with Stephen’s argument is not its substance, but its analysis. Yes, we need a leader that will be strong and stand up to the faculty, that will take responsibly for the actions of the administration, not just because some former US president put a sign on his desk that said “the buck stops here,” but because his actions actually have the power tomake a difference. And yes, we want to avoid future grievances like the ones Stephen mentioned. But Stephen, don’t you get it? Larry was our guy. His was our best shot at anyone standing up to the smugly satisfied, self-interested, childish faculty. And now he’s gone, and that same faculty is emboldened, ready to heel the next president, whichever unfortunate soul accepts the job. That’s what we got, and now we just have to live with it.

So darn right we deserve better.

-----------------

*Out To Lunch :)


Oh, and I echo this sentiment in the NYT, albeit in more concise form.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/22/education/22harvard.html?_r=1&hp&ex=1140584400&en=fe070565bc75621e&ei=5094&partner=homepage&oref=slogin

Well. This has certainly been an interesting day, not only because of the sudden and relatively unexpected (at least to me) resignation of President Summers, but also because of the massive and dare I say unprecedented amount of media suddenly converging on our campus (and its electronic equivalent) to report on it. There are the usual suspects: NYT, Boston Globe, WSJ, Drudge, NECN, and of course The Crimson - but most striking to me has been the amount of coverage coming from within the campus. Blogs like CambridgeCommon and DemApples have probably had greater readership in the past 18 hours than The Crimson, and other campus publications have come out of nowhere to add to the debate - CampusTap, Essembly, The Harvard Independent Online (of dubious relevance) and WHRB (which is broadcasting Summers' speech as I write this). RedIvy.org has also chipped in our $0.02, more than doubling our previous readership records. (Incidentally this has not been good for the HCS servers, which may push campus blogs to find a better host.) It seems Andrew Golis's dream of an alternative campus media may be coming to fruition, and I actually agree with him that this is mostly a good thing, though not just for liberals. Cheers all around, and this may not be over if Drew Trombly goes through with his sit-in.

Enough about the media coverage. I'm writing this post to present a viewpoint which is in the minority not only on campus but also in the Harvard Republican Club. In phone calls and conversations today, I've been struck by the fact that virtually every single Republican I've spoken with has stood in unwavering defense of President Summers. In fact, with one exception I found out about a couple of hours ago, I am the only Republican I know who isn't completely against the resignation.

This post is an effort to explain why I don't support Larry's presidency, from my perspective as a Republican and also as a student. I'm certainly not speaking for HRC in this matter, but only offering my personal views (as you know, all of the posts on this blog are unofficial in nature). I would also like to remind non-blog reporters about our no-quote policy on the blog (see right). Later tonight, Josh Downer will post his opposing view in favor of Summers. Hopefully this will instigate some much-needed dialogue.

It seems pretty clear to me that Larry Summers has actually been a bad President. I don't know what the actual written job description of the President of the University is, but as far as I can gather, the Harvard Corporation chose Summers because they thought we needed a strong leader in this time of transition for the University. In every instance I can think of, Summers has been either a weak leader, or a bad leader.

I can easily rattle off a number of major failures that have occurred during the past few years, all under Summers' administration. Note: Most of these were not the direct result of Summers' decisions. But he was chosen by the Harvard Corporation to be a forceful leader of the entire University, and leadership is the nature of his position. At the very least, and more was possible, he should have used the bully pulpit forcefully.

• The University effectively ousted the head of the Harvard Management Company, right after he oversaw investments that made more than $2 billion for the University in a single year. Why did we oust him? We weren't willing to pay him about $18 million a year after a few alumni protested that salaries were too high. Think about that for a second. Just think about it. That ranks among the worst management decisions of all time, a dumb and wholely irrational decision, and it happened while Summers was President. Where was Summers? What happened to the bully pulpit? Where were his economic principles that are inducing so many Republicans to claim right now that he is the best president we can hope for? If he's such a conservative economist, why didn't he stand up more vigorously for the HMC managers? The managers left mostly because they felt they weren't welcome - and Summers could have provided that welcome as the President of the University. This in itself justifies his resignation.

• The University, and particularly the Deans whom Summers (partly) oversees, have over the past few years privately developed a plan to construct/remove space for student groups that is so flawed that it may actually have a net negative effect on students's well-being (besides its enormous price tag). The plan, which we are told is now non-negotiable, would kick existing student groups like the IRC, the Salient, the BGLTSA etc out of their spaces in Thayer to make way for "freshman social space" and the Women's Center (see below). The Deans under Summers decided on their own with little or no consultation of the student body that freshmen would like additional social space in their dorms, apparently oblivious to the extreme underutilization of social space currently existing in the basements of Wigglesworth, the Straus common room, etc. What exactly students will do with their new dungeons is unknown. The bigger issue, however, is that the administration decided (also mostly if not entirely under Summers' tenure) to give student groups space all the way out in Hilles, in the Quad, rather than giving students the plot of land slated for development opposite Felipe's. What happened to that plot of land? We're building an administrative building for the library there, because if any part of Harvard needs more buildings, our libraries do. Meanwhile, student group offices planned for Hilles will be outfitted with everything student groups need to do their serious work - big conference tables, desks, chairs, storage space, etc. There's just one catch. The offices don't have any walls! What good is a conference table for serious meetings if everybody can hear what you're saying? Again - this was not a project Summers was directly planning, but it happened under his administration. Again, it's an issue of leadership, an issue of leading the university in the right direction. And he has manifestly failed.

• The Curricular Review is a big mess. Now, President Summers did act on this - he fired Dean Kirby, which was the right thing to do. So, I'm going to cut him some slack here. But according to The Crimson, he waited at least a full semester to do it, because he worried he didn't have the political capital to do it earlier after the vote of no confidence last spring. In doing so, Summers showed that he lacked the guts for which the Harvard Corporation selected him. A better leader would have taken the offensive and fired Dean Kirby last spring, starting a dialogue on his own terms about the goals of the University, a dialogue for which his opponents in the Faculty are ill-prepared.

• Under Summers' tenure, the administration has decided that it wants to create a Women's Center, after consulting with the feminist group RUS and basically nobody else (looks like a pattern to me). That this was a defensive maneuver after Summers' much-maligned comments on women and science is too obvious to deny. Most Republicans I've spoken with, including those who are most supportive of Summers right now, are adamantly opposed to the development of a Women's Center in any form. How then can they justify supporting Summers? I get the sense that many Republicans continue to have warm feelings for Summers in the aftermath of HRC's and Students For Larry's support for him during the women/science controversy, but what these Republicans fail to realize is that Summers' only response since then has been to cave under pressure. Thus the Women's Center.
  

I could go on and on: The new CGIS building exterior's aesthetic disaster. The decision to lottery spaces in the prefrosh extracurricular fair so that HRC, the Dems etc. aren't guaranteed a spot (important because it demonstrates a greater trend of not thinking through decisions properly).

But the problem is about more than specific examples of the University administration's incompetence, egregious though they may be. The flaws of the administration can be summarized in two points: A) An inability and unwillingness to think through decisions or talk to students, especially evident in the student space debacle. B) An unwillingness to cut against the grain in the name of leadership and sound management, especially evident in Summers' failure on HMC and his overall duck-and-cover response to Faculty attacks.

Republicans justifiably are concerned about who Summers' successor will be. There is a lot of concern that s/he will be very liberal, and will kowtow to the Faculty's inordinate demands. I share those concerns, but the best response is to think about who the next President will be, rather than trying to keep Summers around. Besides the impossibility of success, this course is a bad one because Summers is simply not the centrist crusader Republicans wishfully describe him as. If he were, he wouldn't be in this mess in the first place.

Republicans are also concerned that this resignation is an unjust punishment being inflicted on Summers for his politically-incorrect comments on women and science. This also is untrue. As we now know, the Faculty were determined to remove Summers and seized on whatever means of doing so they could find. There are broader issues at play here, and anybody who tries to reduce the conflict to that issue is certainly mistaken.

By all means, lament Larry. He's a nice guy, and I don't enjoy this conflict. But he just hasn't been a good President of the University, and we deserve better.

If the whispers now leaking from the administration are as reliable as those that predicted Dean Kirby's resignation, then Larry Summers's brief presidency at Harvard will soon be coming to a close.

[Update: when I started writing this post, Summers resignation was not yet official. The announcement of his resignation doesn't really change my take on what follows.]

I have very mixed feelings about this. Summers's position seems to have been undermined mostly by animosity between him and the university faculty. And this animosity seems to have formed in reaction to two rather different facets of Summers's tenure here. First, his attempts to bring the university more thoroughly under the guidance of the central administration (and the brusque, aggressive manner with which he has pursued centralization) have clashed with faculty prerogatives and angered more local governing bodies within the university. Second, his propensity to speak off-the cuff turned faculty sentiment against him because, in his more candid moments, he tends not to show proper deference to standard left-of-center intellectual opinion (a representative, if not exhaustive, sampling of such controversies can be found in the links of this cambridgecommon.com post).

I'm sympathetic with Summers in both instances.

Consideration of the first conflict, I think, goes to the root of the University's identity. Let's take as given that universities exist for the sake of knowledge and learning. Who's vision of education, then, should the university endorse? I think we can reject as at least incomplete an assertion that, because it exists for their enlightenment, the university should forward students' vision of education. If students come to Harvard to learn, then how can they have standing to set its curriculum? It is tempting, as a result, to fall back on the idea that the university should forward the professors' vision of education. But I think this idea is, also, insufficient. The faculty are, at some level, employees chosen only for their excellence in their field, not for their overall vision of education.

Harvard's management, as I understand it, represents something of a compromise. The Harvard Corporation is designed to pursue - at least in theory - the vision of the alumni. Why the alumni? This body, at some level, represents an intersection between the students and faculty. They were (at one point) the students for whose education the university exists, and they are (now) those who have received the benefit of the education that the faculty could best endow them with.

Whether the alumni vision is in fact the best model (and whether the Harvard Corporation does in fact pursue this model) is a point of debate. But I think it has at least a fuzzy sort of merit to it. If we accept as a further given that the alumni model is a good way to realize the university's goal of education, and that it is realized in the Harvard Corporation (the weakest assumption, perhaps, that I will make in this post), then we may be resigned to defend the Corporation's vision for the university - which seems to be one of centralization.

The pursuit of centralization was bound to crush a few sensitive toes, and we can forgive Summers for inspiring a certain level of grumbling. But there must be some level of faculty dissatisfaction too high to be worth the reward of a more centralized university. If Summers managed to reshape the curriculum perfectly to plan but, in the process, offended all the tenured professors so greatly that they quit, the university would hardly benefit. I agree with the last to posters that Harvard's faculty has a liberal bias. Nonetheless, it is first class. And if all the first class liberal professors left, they would undoubtedly not be replaced by first class moderates and conservatives. They would be replaced by second class liberals.

Are we anywhere near that point? Probably not. But it would not require an elaborate argument to defend the position that someone could govern Harvard at least more easily and less disagreeably than Summers.

And Larry's "tyranny" is only half the story - or maybe less. I suspect that the faculty would have an easier time stomaching his centralization efforts if there was a sense that he was their tyrant. The claims against Summers administrative efforts are generally vague or forgivable, and are inevitably foreshadowed by tangible anger toward Summers's politics. Take this post from "Democracy for America - Cambridge" for example. The author proposes a list of Summers failings as such:

If it weren't for Summers, Harvard would still have the stellar, all-star African American Studies department that it had under former President Neil Rudenstine. Harvard's extremely aggressive financial aid policy, which made life much easier for low-income students, was also set in motion President Rudenstine (full disclosure: I benefited, and handsomely, from that policy.) Harvard was very outspoken in favor of affirmative action, less accommodating of ROTC, and relatively benign towards the living wage protesters under old Rudey, than it is (or would have been) under Summers.

Except for the complaint that Summers has injured the African Studies department, none of the complaints seem that relevant to student life. So what if Summers has made fewer empty statements in support of affirmative action? This doesn't affect Harvard's actual policy either way. The financial aids may have been imagined under Rudenstine, but they were certainly implemented during Summers's tenure, and there has hardly been any sort of roll-back there. ROTC policy has been complicate by the Solomon amendment and I am unsure what exactly the complaint is with regards to Summers's treatment of Living Wage workers.

And these complaints (besides the AfAM department one) hardly show the administration to be making drastic and damaging moves against student life; they just show the administration making minor policy changes that don't conform with the liberal stock position.

And this seems to be the most common complaint against Summers. He speaks off the cuff in ways that offend liberal sensibilities. He dares to hypothesize in private that inherent aptitude may have a minor role in the unequal ratio of men to women in upper level science positions. He oppresses Palestine with the suggestion that criticisms of Israel are often unfair and lopsided. He claims that the majority of Native American deaths resulted from the unplanned spread of disease through their population, which while perhaps true, was not the side of the truth that the academic establishment wanted to discuss. He pollutes pristine African paradises in his depraved hypotheticals. He claims to be a Democrat, but, all too often, seems to end up defending the wrong end of the political spectrum. Almost inevitably, these mis-steps, and not administrative failings, seem to be the ones to inspire outraged headlines in the news and provoke no-confidence votes.

It helps me like him that his mis-steps often put him on my end of the political spectrum. But I am also moved to defend him because the complaints provoked by the above "offenses" are uniformly irrelevant, unfair, or stubbornly obtuse. Whatever his flaws of character, Summers is not, as best I can tell, a bigot. He is a man that is deeply interested in intellectual debate, and who is not afraid to examine angles of issues that others reflexively reject.

But as laudable as his commitment to discourse may be, at some point, the Corporation and the university will be better served by replacing him than by stubbornly backing him against the faculty. If I could choose my way to a better Harvard, I would choose for the faculty not to be so bothered by Summers's off the cuffery. Likely the Corporation would do the same. But the Corporation only has the power to fire and hire. Firing the faculty won't win them over. Hiring a new, equally talented faculty that will not object to Summers isn't a realistic option. If the situation needs to be gotten out of, then the only option left to the Corporation is to fire Larry and hire a replacement.

The Af-Am Studies incident illustrates the point well, I think. Maybe Summers's questions to Cornell West were completely appropriate and reasonable. Maybe not. But one way or another the conversation between President and Professor led to the loss of several tenured professors, respected in their department. The incident doesn't bother me that much because I've never taken an Af-Am class, and likely will graduate without ever doing so. But I can see how I might be annoyed with Summers if it had been a group of Classics professors that he had sent packing (Then again I wouldn't be too sympathetic to Classics professors who wasted their time making rap CDs. But then again again Af-Am concentrators probably feel differently.). The Af-Am gaff was forgivable because it was local to a single department and at the beginning of Summers's tenure. But if the entire FAS faculty - for rational or irrational reasons - has become so unwilling to work with Summers that they would quit, or simply refuse to cooperate with administrative reforms, than it is almost certainly best for the Corporation to replace Summers and move on.

None of this implies a criticism of Summers on a substantive level. Nearly every assessment of his vision that I have read in the Crimson or elsewhere has taken a pretty positive view of his administrative plans. And certainly I am fairly frustrated with the faculty for forcing this action: to the extent that their dislike of Summers is a product of his willingness to entertain and examine hypotheses outside the liberal canon, I think it is sorely undeserved. But if the goal is the interests of the university, it may be best that Summers is calling it quits.

Who will the next president be? Andew Golis suggests that the Corporation might choose a woman as Summers's successor. I think this is about right. If the Corporation cares about the reforms that Summers was trying to effect, then choosing a woman would likely defuse the half of objections to Summers that made people's blood boil. Certainly the faculty will be emboldened after this, and more than ready to cross swords with someone with ambiguous liberal credentials.

Wikipedia, private Harvard email lists and several harvard blogs are reporting that President Summers will be resigning. If true this is a blow for intellectual freedom and shows that if we at Harvard have anything to be embarassed about, it's our faculty and not our president.

If the rumor mill is true, then tomorrow will go down in the annals of Harvard history as a truly sad day indeed. A moderate and effective President with many great ideas will be forced to resign by a group of very vocal socialist FAS professors that have hijacked this university, despite clear opposition from both the student body and the faculty of most of the graduate schools. It all started with a few innocent and completely appropriate comments made that were a little too much for the professors' vision of a socialist utopia embodied in Harvard. If we can be grateful for anything in this, it's that the pack of wolves who forced Summers out will have little or no say in who comes in next. Maybe our next president will help us to work towards giving them the boot, something that, I think we can all agree, is long overdue.

Andrew Golis has wasted no time in condemning the Salient's decision to reprint some of the Danish cartoons that sparked uproar across the Muslim world.

Golis dismisses the Salient's actions as "attention-mongering," but his critique seems somewhat wanting in details. I have some questions for Golis that I think he might clarify his position by answering.

1) Can it ever be appropriate for the media to reprint these pictures?

2) If the media, a critical tool for the dissemination of information relevant to current events, is an inappropriate, er, medium through which to reprint these pictures, than what is?

3) If there is no appropriate way to disseminate these pictures to the public, then how can people judge their propriety?

4) Is it, in fact, necessary to judge the propriety of a given picture when considering whether it is offensive? Are there any taboos so objectively silly that we can agree to reject them? Or do we simply accept a given person or group's "offense" as sufficient proof that it is "unacceptable."

5) If the latter, then what degree of offense is necessary, what groups or individuals have claims on what is acceptable?

6) Are the pictures, in fact, unacceptable (or bad, inadvisable, wrong etc)? Why?

7) Finally, is the Salient's reprinting of the pictures the offense itself? Or is their commentary on the pictures somehow objectionable?

The Salient, which I edit, is getting considerable press over its decision to publish four of the Danish cartoons on the back cover this past week.

The Crimson picked up the story Monday, and the Boston Globe published a story today. It'll be on Channel 4 news in Boston this afternoon and evening.

Although The Salient has yet to receive an invitation, I've heard the Harvard Interfaith Council will host a forum at 7 p.m. tomorrow (Thursday) in Kirkland Junior Common Room to discuss the issue. Although the sensitivity crowd will predominate (especially since the meeting conflicts with part of the HRC's Lincoln Day Dinner), a handful of Salient people should be on hand.