Shots In The Dark: Whoops, Missed One

Monday, February 12, 2007

Whoops, Missed One

In the stead of a bold albeit tactless social scientist and a former cabinet secretary, Harvard has ensconced a career academic and mid-level administrator culled from the women’s studies henhouse....

Faust has carved out a niche for herself all-too-typical of the intellectual provincialism characteristic of many of this generation’s scholars, having fashioned a career scribbling about vacuous constructions of “gender” and “ritual” during a time period in which they had little acknowledged meaning.

A small sampling of Faust’s bibliography will unavoidably elicit snickers from those outside the confines of the Academy: “The Rhetoric and Ritual of Agriculture in Antebellum South Carolina,” “The Civil War Soldier and the Art of Dying,” and the above-mentioned “Altars of Sacrifice.”

Meanwhile, Larry Summers effectively administered the $11-billion budget of the Treasury Department.....

—Christopher Lacaria, the Crimson

¶ 10:47 AM

Comments:

Here's a nice parallel Lacaria missed:

Among Summers' many missteps, he had an early two-fer. When he summarily refused student requests for a Latino Studies program or Ethnic Studies generaly, he told them that studying such things was unimportant, and that the only reason Harvard had an Af-Am program at all was because of the Civil War (rather than, say, because of the importance of the black experience, the important accomplishments of African-Americans, the excellent scholarship of Harvard's own professors in the field, etc).

I believe that President Faust's acquaintance with the Civil War may help her avoid the kind of unthinking remarks that doomed her predecessor.

# posted by Anonymous : February 13, 2007 12:32 AM

That Summers had some blind spots does not make the current prez any more qualified. I have to agree that some of her research seems shallow, but hopefully not all of it is.

But Summers was correct on one thing: area studies programs tend to be magnets for poor scholarship because they serve double duty: academic research as well as group self-congratulation. The latter in the end serves nobody.

# posted by Anonymous : May 13, 2007 5:09 PM

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