America in the Balance

ACADEMIA: THE INMATES HAVE TAKEN OVER THE ASYLUM OR LARRY SUMMERS

DOES HARVARD

by

Ken Eliasberg

For some time now I have wanted to address the plethora of issues that concern us domestically but have felt compelled to give priority treatment to the “War on Terror.” Why? Because all else pales into insignificance when the stakes of that war are properly evaluated. And this is not meant to lend a false sense of drama to the situation. I happen to sincerely believe that our civilization is threatened; indeed, I believe that it is distinctly possible that we are living in the twilight of Western Civilization, and that our country is so polarized as to seriously impair our ability to do what is necessary to preserve our way of life. Worse yet, the Democrats are so eager to regain power—an understandable objective—that they have lost all sense of purpose when it comes to national security, downplaying either or both the war or the manner in which it is being waged at every opportunity. One of the more repellant ways was Gore Vidal’s recent statement to the effect that the war on terror was like a war on dandruff, no doubt an effort on the part of this somewhat arrogant, abrasive, anti “American elitist (effetist?) to trivialize the nature of the threat posed by radical Islam. It is this kind of treasonous stupidity that will bring us to our knees, and my colleague J.J. McDonough is right on the money when he uses the expression “useful idiot” to describe people of this nature, including our local idiot who took him to task for doing so. By the way the expression “useful idiot” was coined by Lenin to describe the necessary support of agents of the host country who willingly participate in their own country’s demise.

So much for introductions; henceforth I shall try to give equal time to both domestic and foreign matters. You can, of course, understand how I might regard survival as a transcendental concern; dead people have no rights or concerns and vanquished societies need pay only modest attention to matters of a domestic nature

In any event, while I intend to deal with education at some length down the road, a couple of events that have transpired while I was immersed in immigration, Iraq, and Islam are of particular interest to me. The first is Larry Summer’s unpleasant experience at Harvard, once the pinnacle of education in this country; the second is the recent effort to socially promote about 50,000 of our High School seniors even though they failed to pass the appropriate exit exams. Let’s look at the Summers fiasco first.

Larry Summers, a very bright liberal, replaced Bob Rubin as Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury, and, while I might take issue with Summers and Rubin on certain policy matters, I have nothing but respect for each of them. These guys are intellectual heavyweights with pedigree and class and among the very few Clinton appointments for whom I had a high regard. Summers had a distinguished academic background, which included a tour at Harvard. So, when Harvard picked him to succeed Neil L. Rudenstine as the 27^th president of Harvard University I was neither surprised nor disappointed. On the contrary, I was pleased. And when Summer’s first acts demonstrated that he was genuinely concerned with scholarship, as opposed to the more typical presidential function of fund raising, I was delighted. Harvard is—or at least has been - our academic flagship, but, like the rest of academia it has fallen under the spell of liberal feel goodism with a commensurate drop in its academic substance. Summers was bent on restoring the reasons for its reputation. Poor fellow, was he in for a shock - a fatal one as it turned out.

The path of his departure was paved by the following 3 events:

1. He had the temerity to ask Cornell West, a pretentious pedant,

to engage in some serious scholarship (as opposed to preparing

a rap album and helping Al Sharpton, a shameless political hack,

with his campaign for President - my God how did it come to the point where an unscrupulous buffoon like Sharpton could even

entertain such a prospect).

2. At a gathering of scholars looking into the question of why

there were many more men in the higher realms of math and

science, Summers made the unpardonable mistake of suggesting

that the group might want to explore the possiblitiy—just the

possibility, mind you—that perhaps men and women were

hard wired differently—duh!—and perhaps this might have

something to do with it.

2. Finally, the poor deluded man suggested that it might be a

good idea to raise the level of scholarship at one of our

nation’s most prestigious universities by make the students

earn honors, rather than just doling them out, i.e. better than

90% of Harvard seniors receive honors (in my day, you had

to earn honors; they were not entitlements, and,, as a result, only 5 or 10% of the class were honors students—made sense to me “

you see my father had the quaint idea that self esteem was

not a gratuity; you don’t appreciate something unless you’ve earned it).

CORNEL WEST.- Let’s deal with Cornel West first. Cornel West was, at the time of the dispute in question, one of only 14 professors who Harvard had honored by making him a University Professor—an obviously rare distinction. He has been labeled “particularly by himself - America’s pre-eminent black scholar. Nothing is, or could be, further from the truth. He is a salesman—nay, a con man—who, thanks to a shamelessly distorted approach to affirmative action, scaled Harvard’s academic heights. He did this by riding the coattails of White guilt; in this regard, I highly recommend Shelby Steele’s latest effort, White Guilt: How Blacks & Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era (Steele is a brilliant black scholar at the Hoover Institute). West is a pretentious pedant who has never birthed anything innovative or creative, let alone spawned anything profound. Lest you think I’m being unkind, let me give you some other evaluations of West and then a sample of his writing so that you might make your own determination re his scholarship.

Leon Wieseltier, a liberal and the literary editor of the New Republic, a liberal journal, had this to say about West:

Since there is no crisis in America more urgent than the crisis of

Race, and since there is no intellectual in America more celebrated

for his consideration of the crisis of race, I turned to West, and

read his books. They are almost completely worthless.

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West’s eccentricity is surpassed by West’s vanity

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West’s books are monuments to the devastation of a mind by the

squalls of theory. He complains that