Speaking of language, compare the clumsy opening quote in the Crimson:

“Evelynn is my choice as the College dean because, first and foremost, she’s the best person for the job, independent of the fact that she’s a woman and an African-American,” said Dean of the Faculty Michael D. Smith in an interview. “I think the fact that she’s both of those things will bring a unique perspective that perhaps we haven’t had in the past.”

with the sanitized press release, from which you can't even tell her ethnicity:

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/home/news_and_events/releases/hammondsDean.html

Harwellian. That's good.
 

I search Prof. Hammonds' bio in vain for anything that might suggest she is qualified to lead a liberal-arts college.

Let me explain what I mean by those two terms.

COLLEGE: a place where students are brought together to share a common experience and learn from each other in a setting structured by intellectuals.
YET Prof. Hammonds' work has been all about the faculty, and nowhere about students and their experience.
SAMPLE TERMS from her bio:
"efforts to build the faculty across the University"; "eager to help the College reach its goals"; "keen understanding of the changing and diverse needs of our undergraduates."
Allow me to suggest that it is just possible that the needs of our college students are neither changing nor diverse. The students themselves are diverse but their needs have to do with community, just like they have always done.

I think the last two paragraphs in the press release are particularly telling: "In addition to her experience and accomplishments as senior vice provost, Hammonds is a distinguished scholar and teacher."
In what follows are scholarly achievements but nothing whatsoever about her teaching. This does NOT mean she is a mediocre teacher, but it does mean she is not a 'distinguished' one. A distinguished teacher has something to be said about her teaching that distinguishes her. A distinguished dean also has something more to say about her charges than that they are 'wonderful' and talented. The institution certainly has needs; but they should be defined with reference to the students' needs, not the other way around.

LIBERAL ARTS means that students encounter and reckon on their own terms with the disciplinary demands of everything from titration to Federalist Ten. Learning is valued for its own sake and not for its future utility.
YET Prof. Hammonds's work recently has been focused on Diversity, not pedagogy, and when it was most scholarly it moved across disciplines before it then transcended discipline entirely with her promotion to the Provost's Office. Her most scholarly work seems to be about efficacy in social context, in "The Campaign to Control Diphtheria in New York City, 1880-1930." Blurbs praise her book's utility: "the insights which historical study can offer modern efforts at limiting the miseries of disease in diverse social situations."

She is an intellectual, clearly, but there is a clear implication that she sees social history as a means to the end of improving the world. I applaud this is a human being but not as an educator -- Harvard students are too young to be improving the world with their ideas. They need humility and patience, and do not need to be told that their talent makes them special.

What we see in this choice (I suggest, looking to provoke you) is the apotheosis of Administration as a prime academic value. An administrator -- a SENIOR VICE PROVOST -- is becoming the leader of a college that has never, in recent years, paid enough attention to student development and pedagogy. Prof Hammonds's qualifications are like fresh, clean water to a drowning sailor.

There is plenty of reason to hope that Prof Hammonds will do an excellent job. But she will do so because of personal strengths and wisdom, not professional qualification. Here's hoping that she can adapt quickly to the real concerns of college students: concerns that they can voice as well as concerns that they cannot voice and do not themselves necessarily understand.

Administrative skill is great for a bureaucrat but should be secondary for a dean. Over to you, Harry.

Anonymity has its benefits! I can voice all this in maximally provocative way. Have at it, everyone!

I will be at Zeph Stewart's memorial with all this in mind. He was a wonderful House Master, and a perfectly useless classicist. I'm too young to be a purist and a fogey, but I wish we were getting a dean like him instead of someone with an apparatchik's bio.

Fingers crossed --

Standing Eagle
 

Smith's rhetoric as pointed out by 8:16 sounds uncomfortably similar to G.H.W. Bush's introduction of Clarence Thomas, also proffered in the initial presentation before anyone had questioned him on the topic.
"Mr. Bush said he had nominated Judge Thomas, the conservative former chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, because he was "the best man" for the job."

Please note that this comment is IN NO WAY meant to draw a parallel between Prof Hammonds and the jurisprudential underwhelmer Thomas. It is meant to draw a parallel between the hamhanded Pres Bush press conference and the hamhanded quotation from Smith that 8:16 pointed out. (There is however an odd little similarity between Thomas's previous job at the EEOC and Hammonds' previous job in the Provost's office. Uncomfortable even to point out, though.)


All best wishes to Prof. Hammonds for success. The Ad Board is hard to lead, and students are complex -- she will have a steep learning curve and will do fine as long as she knows that.

SE
 

I'd like to say that I support Prof . Hammonds. I heard her speak at Brown University in the spring of 1987 . She made such an impression on me, a graduating senior that when she was appointed asst. provost for diversity & faculty development I immediately remembered her from some 20 yrs earlier. I think before making a judgement one ought to sit down with her one and one and interview her. ebr
 

What did she say?
 

SE,
OK, taking the bait here. I trust 'perfectly useless' is here meant as a designation for all classicists, not a judgment of Zeph Stewart as classicist, where he was as wonderful as he was at housemastering. Just checking. See you at the service.
 

Exactly right, RT. Classicists' uselessness is one of their best features, and one I strive to emulate in my own scholarly output.

New book on the way! to compete with Richard's. Whole different kind of American pastime involved though.

SE
 

Good, SE. Clues on the book?
 

C'mon RT and SE, I begged you guys yesterday... tell us what you think about the harvard hoops scandal!
 

If anonymous 9:39 was asking me what did Prof Hammonds say in 1987, (she was a guest lecturer in Brown Univ. Biology Prof Anne Fausto Sterling's class on Women & Minorities in Science.) She was able to speak not only to her own experience in the field of the History of science, but also to the importance of women &minorities in science getting enough support to continue on in the field through college and beyond. (That being filtered through 21 years of my memory)ebr
 

Now we have two deans from the same small department, which happens to be the same department in which Faust's husband is appointed.

As an administrator, Hammonds track record is not impressive. There has been little if any progress in meeting the main goals her office for which her office is responsible. (Not her fault perhaps, but that does not make a positive record.)
 

This is a bit belated because I have only recently done some digging into Hammonds's background. In brief, her appointment as Dean of Harvard College is a farce, but then, so is her presence on the Harvard Faculty in any capacity. Her supposed "background" in science (physics) never led to any publication in that area. Even so, her total output is remarkably thin, as can easily be determined from her online CV. Though she claims to have a book contract, she has never published a book of her own. She has "edited" a number of compendia, but this is hardly a major scholarly achievement; it is largely honorific. Her published papers are few, and they all seem to fall within the dubious category of feminist cheerleading (with some "critical race theory" thrown in for good measure). A number of them fall within the pseudo-discipline of "feminist science studies", a field devoid of any scholarly merit as history,sociology, or philosophy. It is merely a prime example of what Harold Bloom called "the schools of resentment." In this context, she has associated with professional martyrs like Donna Haraway and Helen Longino, though their "production", such as it is, greatly exceeds her poor mite.

The question is how she attained a full professorship at what, not long ago, used to be the premier history of science department in the world before it immolated itself in the flames of postmodern nonsense and identity politics. But to raise that question is, alas, to answer it, to Harvard's great disgrace. What is particularly galling is that she succeeds Benedict Gross in this vital deaconal position at Harvard. Gross, of course, was a first-rate mathematician and a scholarly role-model of the most admirable kind. One shudders to think what kind of intellectual inspiration the submediocre Hammonds will provide.

Even Harvard's notable triumph over favored Yale in this year's edition of The Game can't make up for this disgrace.

A despairing alum,
 

Um, this looks like a book to me:

http://www.amazon.com/Childhoods-Deadly-Scourge-Diphtheria-1880-1930/dp/0801870976/ref=sr_1_11?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206243215&sr=8-11


SE