What's Good for the Goose
What if Larry Summers were receiving an award from a men's group about what a great role model he is for young men, and during a question-and-answer session, he referred to all the female undergraduates as "girls"?
People would be pissed off, right? Letters to the Crimson...dark mumblings...shaking of heads at the Faculty Club.
But that's exactly what Drew Faust did yesterday, with the genders reversed.
Yesterday the Harvard College Women's Center gave Faust an award for "professional achievement." As the Crimson reports, in a subsequent q-and-a,
Faust shied away from talking business, declining to answer questions about her role in undergraduate life, and at one point asking Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 to answer a question about whether the recent focus on equal opportunity for young women had left undergraduate men neglected. “It’s not a strategy on my part* to deflect these questions to someone else,” she said, “but Dick, is there a concern about boys?”
Boys?****
I wonder how Drew Faust would have felt, back when she was in college in the late 1960s, if an incoming male president referred to her as a "girl."
A president whose rise to power was predicated on her predecessor's gender-insensitive remarks ought to be more careful with her language. After all, men aren't the only ones who can be sexist.
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Incidentally,
this* is an interesting piece of rhetoric. As anyone who has followed Drew Faust over the past several months knows, it is exactly
her strategy to deflect these questions to someone else.
There's nothing wrong with that. If Faust doesn't feel that it's appropriate for her to discuss substantive matters in public, that's her prerogative.
But when the double-speak begins—"it's not a strategy on my part," when clearly it is—that's when a leader's credibility starts slipping away. The erosion happens so subtly at first, you don't even realize it. But remarks like that start the process.
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****A poster writes the following:
Here's a classic case of: you had to be there. Faust was responding to a question about "boys." The person who asked the question used the term "boys" repeatedly, and when Faust referred the question to Dean Gross, she was asking him about research in that particular area of developmental psychology.
If that's correct, then I am wrong in faulting Drew Faust for using the term "boys," and I withdraw the criticism with apologies.
