Around the Ivies, Relief that It Didn't Happen There
The
Columbia Spectator and
Yale Daily News both run articles saying, essentially, Whew! So glad it happened at Harvard and not to us.
Okay, that's a little reductive. The Spectator editorial actually praises Larry Summers for his vision and encourages president Lee Bollinger to avoid Summers' mistakes.
(It occurs to me that if Larry Summers had been president at Columbia, where political sensitivity is dramatically greater than at Harvard, he would have been not just ousted, he would have been run out of town on a rail.)
The Yale Daily News article discusses the stylistic differences between Yale president Richard Levin and Larry Summers. Apparently they interviewed some very wise commentators:
Richard Bradley '86, the author of "Harvard Rules: The Struggle for the Soul of the World's Most Powerful University," said the absence of criticism by Levin following the remarks about women and science seems logical.
"Any criticism President Levin might have made would probably have been viewed as a product of the Yale-Harvard rivalry, rather than considered on its merits," Bradley said in an e-mail. "In any case, criticizing the president of another university doesn't seem like Levin's style."