The $50 Million, cont'd.
Rocky Mountain News columnist Vincent Carroll isn't too happy about Larry Summers' decision to spend $50 million on diversity, as he writes in this colum item, "As usual, make the students pay."
Key graf: "It's bad enough that Harvard President Lawrence Summers has spent most of this year backtracking and groveling, by turns, for musing about whether innate aptitude explains in part the ratio of men and women in math and science careers. Now he has embraced reforms that include punishing students who had nothing to do with his remarks and who might not agree with them."
Carroll particularly doesn't like the fact that graduate students in science will be compelled to undergo "sensitivity training" in gender bias.
"If the training is anything like the diversity programs favored by corporate America, it will be condescending and simple-minded, while ruled by the assumption that every participant is a closet Neanderthal."
All of this—the original controversy, the $50 million, the diversity provost, the sensitivity training, everything—is so unnecessary.
What Harvard simply needs is a president who consistently and strongly sends the message that diversity at every level of the university is essential—a "role model," if you will.
Larry Summers, who involves himself in the smallest details of university life in so many other areas, never played any role in this issue until his own ass was in a sling. Why?
I'm still waiting for Summers to hire a high-level woman or minority in his academic administration. How can anyone take Mass Hall seriously on the diversity issue when it has all the ethnic and gender diversity of the Porcellian?
Sadly, the first person Summers will hire to diversify his administration will inevitably be...yes...the diversity provost.
