Saturday, March 19, 2005

Sigh...

Yeah, I actually did believe that the flap over Larry Summers's rather benign comments on science and gender would be over by now. Somehow, being naive, I figured that his apologies (I think he's made three now, although he might be up to four) would help a situation in which he reasonably should not have had to apologize once. But, nope- now the faculty has given him a no-confidence vote.
Again, I have to wonder why nobody thinks that the site of an esteemed woman biologist at MIT telling the national media that she could not hear a hypothesis that she disliked without becoming physically ill and having to leave the room is, in itself, extremely degrading to young women. Anyway, the excuse that these pressure groups are making for trying to get Summers fired, or at least making him grovel a while, is that he is something of a bully. Nobody seems to get the irony of a group of academics publically attacking, humilating and bullyinganother human being, and then calling that human being a "bully".

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