It is about three weeks since Larry Summers resigned as president of Harvard University. That venerable institution of higher learning whose brand name is more powerful, seductive and persuasive than that of any corporation made the main page of almost all major papers that day. Did Summers succumb to pressure from the faculty of arts and sciences known for their “leftier-than-thou” attitudes, or was he forced out because his sharp elbows poked a huckster like Cornell West in the ribs, or was he asked to pack his bags because he chewed out the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences for not revamping the core curriculum that would have made Harvard undergraduates get a more well-rounded education?

Commentary has been wide-ranging in American newspapers, with The New York Times publishing a bland essay by the once fiery lesbian academic, Camille Paglia, The Wall Street Journal presenting the views of Harvey Mansfield who teaches English at Harvard and is considered the campus gadfly by Harvard’s limousine Left, and The Slate magazine showcasing a scathing essay by James Traub in which he points out that, “It’s true that a significant number of the many people I met who loathed Summers considered him a cultural conservative hell bent on pulling down the multicultural, deconstructionist temple of academic orthodoxy.”

Paglia’s essay which sheds neither light nor heat says, “But whatever his good intentions, Mr. Summers often inspired more heat than light.” She points out that Summers’ “stellar early career as an economics professor did not prepare him for dealing with an ingrown humanities faculty that has been sunk in political correctness for decades”. Coming from Paglia, the assessment that Harvard’s arts and sciences instructors have been sunk in political correctness has a ring of factuality and impartiality. Why would not a faculty who are paid so well, who teach only twenty-eight weeks a year, and who teach one or two classes a semester, not be secular, progressive, liberal, and leftist? If you get paid enough to down a $60 bottle of Chardonnay every two days, you should be mellow enough to make the world “flat” – not at your own expense, mind you, but simply as a grand vision.

As Harvard president, Summers “had a duty to research the tribal creeds and customs of those he wished to convert”, says Paglia, and that is where he committed the folly of rocking a well-settled-in-the-socialist-swamp boat. Paglia is echoing what Harvey Mansfield has been saying about the orthodoxy of the liberal/ progressive faculty not just at Harvard but in campuses around the country: that the Left/ progressive are crusty ideologues no different than crusty ideologues in the Right/ conservative camp, but that the Left indeed commandeers higher education.

Mansfield voted twenty years ago against creating a women’s studies major at Harvard, saying, “it is not possible to study women except in relation to men”. He is against the “social engineering” projects that seek “to make the status of men and women equal, or, better to say, the same”. Paglia, a woman, a more sympathetic observer of men than the old, angry feminists, says almost the same thing. She challenges the angry, even shrill and hateful analyses of men-women relationships done by the likes of the dowdy and now dead Andrea Dworkin, who once angrily proclaimed, “Under patriarchy, every woman’s son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.” Paglia seems to echo what Mansfield says about the Summers affair: that Harvard’s president caved into pressure by the radical left at Harvard.

Continued Part II

Ramesh Rao is Professor of Communications at Longwood University, Virginia, USA.