America in the Balance

THE SUMMERS DEBACLE: A POST MORTEM

by

Ken Eliasberg

From previous columns I’m certain that the reader has no problem in figuring out where I stand with respect to what transpired at Harvard—four square behind Larry Summers—which is really four square behind the cause of higher education (which, over the past 40 years, has almost become an oxymoron—“higher” education has gotten lower and lower). Or, as one of my professors put it when I returned to college to do graduate work after retirement—a college education today is the equivalent of a high school education 20 years ago. And, you could have said the same thing 20 years ago, and the same thing 20 years before that. I received an excellent education, but it wasn’t as good as the one my father got 25 years before me. He attended City College of New York, which used to be called the Harvard of New York City, and, in those days, education meant just that—an education. Some time back, a friend of mine—a professor at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo—sent me an exam that they gave 8^th graders in 1895. I guaranty you that 90% of our college graduates today could not pass that exam.

Along the same lines, another friend of mine informed that, while he was doing graduate work at Claremont/McKenna (an excellent school), in the course of studying the Federalist papers, a student observed that they were quite difficult to digest. To which the professor sympathetically responded - that’s understandable since they were written for the comprehension of upstate farmers in New York in the early part of the 19^th century. While this story may be apocryphal, it would not surprise me in the least if it were so. Since the left has taken over education in this country and injected its egalitarian notions that everyone should go to college, we have quite simply dumbed down education to make this possible. And the Summers fiasco provides clear evidence of that being the case. Summers wanted to raise academic standards—to restore Harvard to its glory years; an entrenched arts and sciences faculty of intellectual Lilliputians simply could not allow this to happen and took down a giant to make certain that it would not. The systematic approach to education—in order to accommodate this massive influx—has been to lower standards, rather than raise the level of performance. The consequence is, that while you cannot get very far without a college education, having one is no longer a sign of significant educational achievement, even when it issues from our finest universities.

Setting aside my reaction to the Summers fiasco for the moment, let me share with you the reaction of some others who have addressed the matter.

Suzanne Fields, a syndicated reporter got it right in her February 27, 2006 column in townhall.com when she observed:

The Summers resignation testifies to the tyranny of a politically

correct minority of simpletons who nitpicked him to death. His

resignation is a triumph of the worst on the liberal campus. Only

in a burnt-out grove of academe could Larry Summers, Bill

Clinton’s treasury secretary, be thought a right-wing zealot.

* * * * * * * * *

He was Big Man on Campus for a time, but not big enough to

vanquish the Lilliputians guarding their miserable little nests of

selfish indifference. He wanted a university of open inquiry with

a diversity of ideas, a search for true learning. He wanted to bring

ROTC back to the campus, to honor the military. He would reform

the undergraduate curriculum stagnating in a swamp of sour

indifference to true learning. This is the last thing Lilliputians tolerate.

In an earlier treatment of the Summers debacle, writer Philip Chalk, in his January 25, 2002 column, entitled Professors of Piffle on OpinonJournal.com observed:

Still, the spat [between Summers and West] had one good effect:

It raised a question about what passes for scholarship on campus

these days, and it suggested a way of answering it. If any college

president across the country called his humanities professors in

for a chat, asking them to bring along what they’ve been producing

during their long hours of nonclassroom time, what would end up

on the president’s desk?

Chalk goes on to answer this question later in his column:

When The New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier made his way through

Cornel West’s books a few years ago, he dismissed them as