Sunday, February 26, 2006

Summers Resigns

Harvard President Lawrence Summers resigned last week as the controversies heated up by his five-year reign came to a boil. There an interesting post-mortem on Summers as manager and leader in the New York Times. Also, Alan Dershowitz, a Summers supporter at Harvard, has an understandably angry op-ed piece in the Boston Globe, which (like everything Alan writes) is well worth reading. Summers got his Warholian fifteen minutes last year when he suggested that one reason why there are fewer women than men in the hard sciences, along with several others that he discussed at some length, might be a lower aptitude for math.

My own take? It might be possible (just barely) for a University CEO with Summers' opinions to survive, but he or she would have to be a much, much smoother operator than Summers was. But then, smooth operators generally avoid having such opinions. That's the ultimate in smoothness, isn't it?

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