Dartmouth v. Harvard
Posted on November 26th, 2007 in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
InsideHigherEd reports that a Dartmouth trustee, Todd J. Zywicki, has given a speech in which he attacks the culture of higher education and, more specifically, Harvard.
Those who control the university today, they donât believe in God and they donât believe in country,â he continues. âThe university is their cathedralsâ¦their entire being. Both those who fund it and those who teach within it are tied up in the university.â
[Blogger: The university is their cathedrals?]
Commenting on campus culture as a whole, Zywicki told the audience, âWe have the Spanish Inquisition, and you can ask Larry Summers whether or not the Spanish Inquisition lives on academic campuses today.â
The Spanish Inquisition? Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
I know I should take conservatives more seriously about such thingsâa Dartmouth alum calls for Zywicki’s resignationâbut they’re so over-the-top and ill-informed, it’s hard not to get a good chuckle out of them. Problem is, they are enormously good about getting the message out on such things; their sense of grievance is powerful. But, my gosh, they sound so unhappy.
In any case…speaking of Larry Summers, anyone know how that book of his is coming along?
3 Responses
11/26/2007 10:11 am
I heard Zywicki’s speech. In fact I spoke just before him at this conference, and offered a more benign explanation of the political imbalance in the academy, a suggestion which Zywicki took a moment to counter. His attack on Freedman was strikingly over-the-top, and the generally apocalyptic language about evil I found not very convincing and even less helpful. But he began with a pretty compelling account of the Dartmouth board’s efforts to get the support of the alumni to change the governance structure, and having failed on a couple of votes to do that and having seen a couple of people it didn’t like get elected to the board, simply changing the structure by a vote of its own. I don’t know how accurate his account was, but I didn’t notice any refutation of that in the attacks on his speech. This governance reform just smells very bad, and as I have commented on the isolation of the Harvard Corporation, it seems to me a bad move at Dartmouth to reduce the level of alumni involvement in electing the board.
(Richard, your link is to a guest column by someone from the class of ’52, not a staff editorial opinion.)
I had spoken at Dartmouth a couple of weeks earlier. I gave three talks to different groups, and was talking about higher ed in general and made no specific reference to Dartmouth. At all three talks, the Q&A session immediately degenerated into an argument between the backers of the alumni insurrection and the backers of the university administration and trustees. It was saddening, and made me think that Harvard’s struggles have actually played out in a relatively dignified way!
11/26/2007 10:58 am
I agree that the situation with the Dartmouth board is more complicated than a simple left-right dichotomy…thanks so much for sharing that useful information about the conference. And I’ll fix the link; odd that that happened.
11/29/2007 12:31 am
http://www.youtube.com/v/mKxnaMeOK20&rel=1