Will Summers’ serial surrenders suffice to save his job? Or will, as Ruth Wisse asked in another context, the "bleat of the lamb excite the tiger"?
Debra Saunders has a column worth reading in its entirety (hat tip: The Big Trunk):
The furor should have died down weeks ago, but thanks to a fiercely intolerant streak in most Harvard professors (who were emboldened by Summers’ propensity to self-immolate), the controversy lives on as a mob of angry academics tries to run Summers out of
. Cambridge Where did Summers err? To start with, he concentrated on the wrong gender. If, for example, Summers had said that men are less likely to play the role of primary caregiver in the home, say, because men tend to be less nurturing than women, academia would have applauded his insight. There would be no charges of sexism, as sexism against men is no problem in the Ivy League.
Saunders suggests that Summers should “be a man.” Peggy Noonan writes her own coda to the saga:
[H]ere is what he may be forgetting, for people under pressure often lose track of their lack of culpability: Summers did nothing wrong. He thought aloud about an interesting question in a colorful and un-defended way. That’s what universities are for.
His mistake was stepping on the real third rail in American cultural politics. It’s not Social Security. It is attempting to reconcile the indisputable equality of all people with their differentness.
The left thinks if we’re all equal we’re all alike. Others say we’re all equal but God made us different, too, and maybe he did that to keep things interesting, and maybe he did it because each human group is meant to reflect an aspect of his nature. . .
But what the Summers story most illustrates is that American universities now seem like Medieval cloisters. They’re like a cloister without the messy God part.
Old monks of leftism walk their hallowed halls in hooded robes, chanting to themselves. Young nuns of leftist deconstructionism, pale as orchids, walk along wringing their hands, listening to their gloomy music.
They become hysterical at the antichrist of a new idea, the instrusion of the reconsideration of settled matter. Get thee behind me, Summers.
It will take a while before we discover whether Summers’ retreats this week were tactical or strategic. If he himself is unsure, he might reflect on this passage from T.S. Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages:”
. . . And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realized;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying . . .