February 24, 2006
ISOLATED IVIED IVORY TOWERS:
Students Hail Harvard President: Their strong support for Lawrence H. Summers is seen by some as a sign of a shift in campus politics. (Ellen Barry, February 24, 2006, LA Times)
If Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers was worried about how the undergraduates would greet him Wednesday night at his first scheduled event since announcing his resignation, those fears quickly were put to rest.He got a standing ovation after he walked in. He got a standing ovation before he left. A row of students with red letters painted on their chests spelled out "Larry."
Sarah Bahan, 22, was wistful as she left the meeting. She had kind words to say about Summers' emphasis on hard sciences.
Mark Hoadley, 21, said Summers' monotone speaking style was balanced by a "dynamic mind."
Troy Kollmer, 21, said "a lot of students feel bad for him and think he got a raw deal."
The show of student loyalty has come as a surprise to many faculty members and administrators at Harvard, who grew to loathe Summers during a five-year tenure that brought a raw blast of politics to the 370-year-old institution.
The professoriate lost their intended audience twenty years ago. Posted by Orrin Judd at February 24, 2006 2:57 PM
Students of the world unite, you have nothing to lose.
Posted by: erp at February 24, 2006 3:43 PMStrikes me that the Boomers are losing their own kids these days. The young people in the military and these kids at Harvard seem to be going back to the values of the WW II Generation rather than the values of the Boomers. I think that is great. We as a nation will be a lot better off for them. When can we get rid of the Boomers now!!
Posted by: dick at February 24, 2006 4:41 PM"many faculty members and administrators at Harvard, who grew to loathe Summers during a five-year tenure that brought a raw blast of politics to the 370-year-old institution." So no politics was involved in the '60s protests? To the ultra leftists, anyone else's opinion is politics.
dick, I'm a Boomer. Never lost my kids. They're smart, sucessful and quite conservative, just like the old man tried to raise them. Revile away. I ain't leavin' before the Good Lord calls.:)
Posted by: jdkelly at February 24, 2006 6:24 PMjdkelly: You're living proof of an underappreciated fact. Most baby boomers aren't "boomers" in the cultural sense.
Posted by: Mike Morley at February 24, 2006 7:04 PMMike (and dick) seriously, if I had not been a parent, I would have been a "Boomer". It was the responsibilty of raising my sons that made me grow up. To raise children made me choose. Was the church where I wanted to be, did I want make the effort etc., Fortunately, I was married to a wonderful wife. No credit here.
Hear hear! I often tell people that when they handed me my oldest son in the labor and delivery room, it was the greatest transformation of my life, 'cause life was no longer about me anymore.
Posted by: Mike Morley at February 24, 2006 9:47 PMI can't pretend to have any personal knowledge of the phenomenon, but an old math teacher of mine said his worldview changed upon having a child simply because he was suddenly responsible for another human life, and there was no backing away from that.
Posted by: Matt Murphy at February 24, 2006 11:44 PMLet's see: Most of the kids currently at Harvard would have been between 13 and 17 when Sept. 11 occurred, and between 10 and 14 when the Clinton-Lewinsky sex scandal played out on their TV at home. Combine those life experiences with the self-indulgence of some of the faculty at Harvard -- for whom it's 1968 forever -- and it's not hard to see how many of the students would see their profs living in a fantasy past that in terms of years, is as distant to them as the start of the Great Depression was to the boomers who were doing all the protesting during the Vietnam era.
Posted by: John at February 25, 2006 12:33 AMJohn: Bingo.
It's all about Vietnam and the draft. To understand the Left and especially the Left in academia, we must go back to when cowardice was the servant of treason.
There is no draft today, and all that remains is the treason.
Posted by: Lou Gots at February 25, 2006 3:23 AMI suspect the university that hires Summers will get an big increase in applications.
Posted by: Joseph Hertzlinger at February 26, 2006 9:24 AMTrackBack
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