Last night I suggested that, because of the massive public scrutiny in the Summers case, Harvard’s faculty has inadvertently trapped itself. I stand by that. But isn’t it curious that the mandarins of political correctness brought this scrutiny on themselves. It all started when MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins staved off her fainting spell long enough to alert the press to Summers’s talk. Yes, it’s telling that Hopkins couched her feminist complaint as an imminent loss of consciousness. Yet truth be told, Hopkins wasn’t anywhere near fainting. That was just a pose for press consumption. (Come to think of it, even the classic Victorian fainting spell was often a manipulative put-on.) Hopkins, who authored an influential (and bogus) MIT report on affirmative action for female scientists, calculated that press attention would help her. By the same token, Harvard’s liberal faculty has been acting as though its ongoing public flogging of Summers would strengthen its hand.
The liberals who command America’s key institutions still don’t understand that they’ve lost control of the culture. Dan Rather stood up to the bloggers because he thought he could get away with it. He didn’t realize how far we’d come from the old days of CBS dominance. By the same token, Hopkins and the Harvard faculty thought that bringing in their liberal compatriots in the press would give them an easy win. These folks are killing themselves because they still don’t realize that the blogosphere and the broader conservative media count. Their arrogant underestimation of their opponents is their Achilles heel. By the time it dawns on Hopkins and her Harvard faculty friends that their public antics have discredited them, it will be too late. Just ask Dan.
Meantime, here’s a link to Lubos Motl, a Harvard faculty blogger who is horrified by the excesses of his politically correct colleagues. Love your stuff Lobos. But take note, I’ve taught at Harvard and got my Ph.D. there. So it’s not true that I have nothing to do with the place.