Just think: if Harvard President Larry Summers had compared 9/11 victims to Nazis and apologized for terrorists, academics would be equating criticism of him with censorship. But since he wondered aloud about cognitive differences between the sexes, they want him fired. Harvard's faculty of arts and sciences, the same crew that reiterates its ban on the Reserve Officer Training Corps every few years, issued a "no confidence" vote on Harvard President Larry Summers yesterday. William F. Buckley's quip that he'd rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in a Boston phonebook than by the faculty of Harvard has never rung more true.

perfectly said.

posted it on my blog.

also: loved your latest book.

What else do you expect in this "politically correct" country of ours. The President does not have any real powers. The power resides in the Supreme Court Judges and the ACLU. It makes me sick to see Ward Churchill still have tenure after making such a groetesque statement like he did, and they label that as freedom of speech? Yet the faculty of Harvard U is so quick to put Larry Summers out of a job for making a genetically true statement. Im starting to feel like Im living in Europe, because we are striving so eagerly to please them with our nations decisions. Whats next we stop using American money and switch to Euros?

Are they on a steady diet of lead and mercury over there in Cambridge? Seems like the pointy headed, liberal elitists at Harvard are suffering from ever shrinking IQ’s. Now they’re eating their own (as all good liberals are known to do)!

Summers makes a statement that has statistical merit and the Academic Nazis at one of the most prestigious institutions for learning in the country, where free thought and debate are supposed to be it’s cornerstones, find it intolerant that their leader could be subversive in the temple of their own fuzzy logic.

This is similar intolerance to what happened there a couple of weeks ago when Jada Pinkett Smith spoke to the Birkenstock horde and made positive and innocuous comments about today’s women be able to have it all. The Gay Mafia over there jumped all over her and accused her of being Heteronormative.

The world is going mad and, always ahead of the curve, Harvard seems to be getting there a lot quicker.

Rather than a vote of no confidence, why doesn't the faculty show where its confidence lies. One of them, in the spirit of free thought and debate, should challenge President Summers to a public debate on the issue. Resolution of some sort could be had, and perhaps the confidence of the shaken faculty would be restored.

Yeah, but that would require them to use some thought and mount an argument/debate where they would have combat statistical facts. This is something that the elitist liberal establishment refuses to do. It's much easier to call people names and threaten them.

I guess he was in danger of turning the chemistry department over to the phlogiston crowd hammering down the doors of academia. It starts with gender differentiation but it always ends with phlogiston!

The academics just need to be free to purge whom their professional judgment decrees. And they are the only ones who can judge. My guess is that even a subject like plagiarism is not for tenderfoots like us. Yep.

We should agree to cease and desist the use of words that the Pink Party makes up and thrusts into the common marketplace of ideas. Words like "homophobe" and "heteronormative."

It was the creation of the word "homophobe" that I feel allowed the queer movement into the mainstream by putting mainstream America on the defensive. Nobody wanted to be accused of having a phobia!

Now, with the creation of the word "heteronormative" they are succeeding in marginalizing the mainstream by making the belief in traditional, non-deviant lifestyles just another psychological condition.

Damn, but it is a brilliant tactic, isn't it!? Let's not succumb to it.

Distributist:
Heteronormative is a word with little use. I might mistake its meaning, but, yes, hetero(sexuality) is the norm(ative). Sort of like speaking of lions using the word carnivonormative. It seems perfectly appropriate to be heteronormative when speaking to a normal group of people. If you are speaking to the assembly of tipplers at your local gay bar at happy hour, you would choose a different tack.

Distributist - good point, especially 'homophobe,' which is falsely defined as 'opposition to the mainstreaming and normalization of homosexual acts,' and not merely 'fear of homosexuals.' Therefore all sorts of people get called homophobes and it isn't accurate. If they were afraid, they wouldn't be trying to have a calm conversation.

Distributist,

Great points, man. Best post I've read on this site. Flynnfiles...broadening my horizons one great post at a time.

For a good briefing on "heteronomative" that Distributist is talking about see wikipedia.

"Heteronormativity is a term used in the discussion of gender and society, mostly, but not exclusively within the field of critical theory. It is used to describe, and, frequently, to criticize how many social institutions and social policies are seen to reinforce certain beliefs."

Here's a quote I like: (From Concept)
"[Heteronormativity] questions the common and often tightly held notion that only what is statistically typical is normal and good. It embraces the notion (in the philosophy of ethics) that 'is does not imply ought.'"

Thus what a large group of people choose to do and chose to see as the world, does not imply that they ought to do so. But when a minority of people find themselves with a particular situation, they ought to be able to express what they are.

Now, I don't miss the distinction here. That is does not imply ought does not mean that anything else does, either. Thus that statement can be true if 1) we have an decisive system to decide "ought" and if 2) that "oughts" are just the expression of emotional normative behavior. But more often than not, this cause is taken up by people who think the latter. But at some level the opponents of heteronormativity argue that these people ought to be accepted as they are. A similar sentiment is that we ought to act like animals because we are animals. Or that we ought not to avoid acting like animals because we are animals. Never thinking that whether or not we be animals, we tend to be animals with a pecularity of not wanting to act like them.

America has been increasingly subjected to one-purpose relativism in this fashion. It wants to use the social force of shame to change the social force of shame because it was wrong to shame anyone in the first place. It wants to gain social acceptance, despite that it thinks that what society has accepted in the past is dreadfully wrong.