The trial of Lawrence Summers, accused of propounding unauthorized hypotheses before an academic conference — an aggravated offense given the prior rap sheet of supporting ROTC at Harvard, protesting grade inflation, identifying anti-Semitism on campus, and asking a University Professor to produce scholarly work — reconvenes today at Harvard.
"It’s sounding more and more like the trial of Galileo." Harvard Professor of Law Alan Dershowitz, quoted in the Associated Press,
"If Galileo had only known how to retain the favor of the fathers of this college, he would have stood in renown before the world; he would have been spared all his misfortunes, and could have written about everything, even about the motion of the earth."
The Jesuits, quoted in Galileo, a Life, by James Reston, Jr., page 273.
"The real complaint against Galileo is that he did not rise up like Georgi Dimitrov at the Reichstag trial in
From commentary in Berthold Brecht, Galileo.
"It appears to me that those who rely simply on the weight of authority to prove any assertion, without searching out the arguments to support it, act absurdly. I wish to question freely and to answer freely without any sort of adulation. That well becomes any who are sincere in the search for truth."
Vincenzo Galileo, father of Galileo, quoted in Reston’s Galileo, a Life (page 9).
UPDATE: The invaluable Ed Lasky emails today’s editorial in the
[T]here can be no mistake that this fight is about way more than gender differences. The issues swirling around Mr. Summers include the current war against Islamic terror and the struggle for a Jewish state in
Israel, and it has become a fight for the soul of America‘s oldest and greatest university. . . . Unlike, say, Columbia or Berkeley, whose academic standing was lost to the hard left in the 1960s and early 1970s in an almost irretrievable way, Harvard climbed back into a kind of respectable liberal mainstream.
Two of its most popular recent courses for undergraduates have been a yearlong introduction to economics by a top Reagan administration economist, Martin Feldstein, and a course on the Hebrew Bible taught by an Orthodox Jew, James Kugel. Harvard’s faculty, in Ruth Wisse, Jon Levenson, and Jay Harris, boasts more regular contributors to Commentary magazine than that of any other university we can think of. Its Paul Peterson has done some of the most important research in support of school vouchers.
It’s hard to escape the impression that
Israel is at the center of the current imbroglio, no doubt stemming from the fact that one of the things Mr. Summers did . . . was confront the haters of Israel on campus. . . . One persistent critic of Mr. Summers, Everett Mendelsohn, is the author of a 1982 report for the American Friends Service Committee that called on
America to reduce aid to Israel . . . . Other Summers critics frequently quoted in the press, professors Ken Nakayama and J. Lorand Matory, were among the signers of a petition calling on Harvard to divest from Israel. The point here is not to attribute anti-Semitism to all of Mr. Summers’s critics, or to claim he is the most tactful president in the Ivy League but to illuminate what’s at stake. It may be that the current Harvard faculty can’t tolerate a president who backs
Israel and the American military . . . or who questions the politically correct doctrine on gender differences.
UPDATE: The Crimson reports that if the Faculty eventually holds a vote, there may be two no-confidence motions:
One senior professor, who asked to remain anonymous, said Summers’ opponents intend to move forward with a vote of no confidence — and that if a vote is not held today, they will put the vote on the docket for the March 15 meeting.
"I think it’s almost definite" that a professor will place a vote of no confidence on the agenda for the March meeting should it not take place today, the professor said. . . .
But Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature Ruth R. Wisse, the only professor who spoke openly in support of Summers at last Tuesday’s faculty meeting, hinted that if professors put a vote of "no confidence" in Summers on the docket for the March 15 meeting, they might face another docket item aimed at them.
"I would hope that there would be a condemnation of those who seek to condemn [Summers]," Wisse said. "I think the direst thing that one could do on campus would be to inhibit speech."