I scanned the headlines at nytimes.com and thought that “Troubles Grow for a University Built on Profits” was another article about Harvard’s new president, announced yesterday. The new president is a Civil War historian who has been running Radcliffe, reduced to a $17 million annual grants program (they could have adopted this grand scheme from an earlier Weblog posting, but opted for obscurity instead).
Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard’s first female president, seems never to have offended anyone and has a much lower Google profile than the ousted Larry Summers. A Google search for “Drew Gilpin Faust” brings up just a handful of scholarly references, none of which are available in full text on the Web. One of her books is available currently at amazon and the two readers who bothered to comment are blandly unimpressed: “This book is rather tedious if you are not a fan nor speaker of that odd language known as academia ” and “probably only a woman interested in the history of women would be interested. The entire book is very…well, womanly.” An older book earns two out of five stars: “jargon-laden prose makes this one a sleeper”.
To judge by the Amazon reviews and the Google search, we are in for some quieter times here in Cambridge.
Eight books on Amazon, the “James Henry Hammond” gets five stars, but who expects academic history or anything else to be exciting. Most academics are criticized by their peers for writing books for the public.
Perhaps the Summers fans found her writing too womanly because she demonstrated an inferior grasp of science? I hear women are guilty of that quite often at Harvard.
This new president might cause me to consider studying at Harvard; I never would have applied while Summers was there.
It’s not just women. Reason as such has been under attack at Harvard for decades. The new curriculum makes it official.
Does it even matter? Harvard has a huge financial endowment; provided the US dollar doesn’t collapse (or maybe even if it does), they can muddle along for 50 years or so. As long as Faust doesn’t have a public crazy moment a la Sunera Thobani.