"I love watching Harvard sink into the swamp of mediocrity"

One of the most blessed blogs in the 'sphere, Maggie's Farm is entering the "Terrible Twos." As we said in their comments, "Like Him, you too "refresh thy readers on their toilsome way." Always a hoot. Above, left, the farm itself, a dead ringer for the one in East Kingston, NH where we grew up. Above right, the girl we always were at heart. The Marxist takeover of the feminist project continues to eat our heart out. (Maggie's Farm photos)

"The feminist takeover of Harvard is imminent," writes Heather MacDonald at City Journal, striking fear in the hearts of all right-thinking women (and men):

The Harvard Crimson reported yesterday that the university is about to name as its new president Drew Gilpin Faust, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Harvard's Corporation, which is likely to recommend Faust to the university's Board of Overseers for confirmation, could not have more clearly repudiated Lawrence Summers's all-too-brief reign of meritocracy and academic honesty, or more openly signaled that Harvard will now be the leader in politically correct victimology.

Faust runs one of the most powerful incubators of feminist complaint and nonsensical academic theory in the country. You can count on the Radcliffe Institute’s fellows and invited lecturers to proclaim the “constructed” nature of knowledge, gender, and race, and to decry endemic American sexism and racism

What happened to the Corporation? Were they Stepforded? Is it too late for alums to just say no? Yalie Tuck weighs in:

It's good for Yale. As a Yale alumnus, I'm in favor of it. I love watching Harvard sink into the swamp of mediocrity.

Harvard alumna that we are -- Mummy always wanted us to go to Harvard, and we finally made it, after she had gone on to her great reward, as an "older" grad student in the nineties -- we ourselves have weighed in here more than once re Lawrence Summers's caving to the pussy-whipping (pardon our French) ladies of the Marxist left. From our "Chomsky, Moore, Fisk: Pathetic memebots running the program of a dead tyrant" a year ago:

"A repressive society is a repressive society, wherever it may fall on a continuum of brutality and thought control," we blogged awhile back in our post "Fear societies, heavy and lite," where we cited former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky's "mechanics that sustain such a society." Whether it's back in the gulags of the old USSR, in the imamically orchestrated "street" of today's Arab tyrannies or in the politically correct, ivy-covered towers in our own backyard at Harvard, intimidation is the blogtheme that keeps on giving. Cartoon Wars have it in spades, and now academia's Appeaser-in-Chief, Harvard President Lawrence Summers, is rumored to be about to submit his resignation in the wake of humiliating show trials and appeasement last spring.

Here's a little scary stuff from a Drew Gilpin Faust supporter quoted in the Harvard Crimson a month back:

“There’s no question that if she’s interested in being president of a university, she’s going to be president of a university in no time,” says Steven Hahn, a professor of history at Penn who has known Faust for more than 30 years . . . “I think she’s maybe the most impressive person I know,” Hahn says. “I’d like to see her running the country.”

We've always been wary of fellow Americans who speak of "running" vs. "leading" the country. Does Hillary know about this? Now come the consequences. In our case, as a sentimental graduate of the Design School's awesome if too often PC-hobbled Landscape Architecture program, we've always gotten all weepy and said yes to the brilliant, starry-eyed youngsters who call every year during fundraising drives to ask for our dollars. We've always given with pleasure. But no more if this travesty goes through. As Harvard goes -- in the sense of going to Hell in a handbasket -- so goes the nation? Are Harvard and the New York Times on the same road to irrelevance? Just for fun, a few words out of context from the next president of Harvard University in a July/August 1997 Humanities interview:

I guess I've been studying unpleasant people or politically incorrect people for my whole academic career. My feeling is that it's very important to understand how individuals in the past rationalized lives that we might find unthinkable, because we have our own sets of rationalizations that make us blind to injustices in our own society. My daughter, a committed vegetarian, now tells me that in a hundred years none of us will ever believe that we were eating meat, that there are different standards of values that people are able to convince themselves of. By looking at how people did this in the past, we might be able better to understand the way our own rationalizations work and perhaps to even unpack and be critical of some of those rationalizations and maybe even see some foundations for change in our ability to think critically -- an ability we can be aided in developing by looking at the complexity of historical figures.

So far, so good, but wait:

It is important to celebrate people but not to do so uncritically. By celebrating people in an uncritical way we only make them removed from ourselves . . . Sometimes we lose readers when we don't tell a complicated story that people can identify with, because people are complicated. They're not heroes and heroines. They're combinations of heroism and villainy.

Who but politically correct Marxist "thinkers" would ever dream of "celebrating" people uncritically? Doesn't that statement tell you all you need to know about how far away from common sense this woman and her fellow travelers within their Pauline Kael bubble of political correctness have traveled in their utopianist quest?

Comments

[bird dog]

Thanks for joining in our Uncritical Birthday Celebration.

[Teresa]

Actually, if you want the one sentence that truly tells you all you need to know about her thinking, it's this one...

"My daughter, a committed vegetarian, now tells me that in a hundred years none of us will ever believe that we were eating meat..."

On what set of "facts" does her daughter create this claim? On the fact that she herself is a vegetarian and will suddenly become diet overlord - thus telling everyone what they should eat?

On what rational basis does Ms. Faust accept this claim as fact? Because her daughter says so, therefore it must be true? I would have been far more impressed if she had posited that we would no longer be dependent on oil in 100 years. (at least there are people working on that one)

The implication of the above partial quote should not be lost either. They want this and will try to find some way to "make" the rest of the world do as they wish. What would she say if someone who hated vegetables told her that "someday no one will be eating vegetables, you will all be eating meat because we think it's better for you."

The very fact that rabid feminists (like any other rabid political type group) believe they know what's better for us and want to manage our lives, should make any educated person cringe. Because she is so enamored of her own world view, she wants to "make" people see the world as she does. This precludes any rational discussion over whether her views are valid or not. Why should such a person be leading an institution where the primary goal should be rational inquiry?

The fact that she is seriously being considered to lead Harvard, means there are no more critical thinkers at Harvard and it's pre-eminence remains only because of its money. How sad.

[Sissy Willis]

Teresa: Thanks for your rousing rant! And you're right about the money. As Hugh Hewitt wrote yesterday:

"Taking a notoriously liberal institution and handing it over to a hard left academic is a sure way to spell disaster among the donors. The trouble is that Harvard doesn't need its donors. It doesn't need anyone or anything."

[hnav]

so sad...

but this is exactly what we see in the MSM everyday...

everything, nearly everwhere is all PC, without substance.

[james higham]

This is fascinating, Sissy, not least because I'm reading it from across the pond. Actually, I'm an expat sitting in Russia right now.

Do you mind if I run a second article on Faust [indicative name, yes], drawing heavily on you?

By the way, love your blog layout. More later.

[Sissy Willis]

Egad, James. Draw heavily at will, and be sure to send me a link. Thanks so much for your kind words.

[james higham]

Just came over again to get the text. By the way, did you see my Girlpower Blogfocus this evening? Explosion of girl bloggers. Boys are on Tuesday. Feel free to delete this link once you've got it. The others know the Focus is the only thing I ever promote so don't be fearful I'll be a pest.

http://nourishingobscurity.blogspot.com/2007/02/blogfocus-saturday-girlpower-yo.html

[james higham]

OK, here it is, Sissy. It pales next to yours but it's the best I could do:

http://nourishingobscurity.blogspot.com/2007/02/faust-takeover-latest-manifestation-of.html

[Sissy Willis]

Thanks, James. A first-rate post, and thanks again for the citation and link. :-)

[miss kelly]

As if to prove your point, the Boston Globe article in today's paper includes this telling quote, about her research on "reprehensible characters" such as slave-owners and a "Southern elitist white woman":

" 'Sometimes I couldn't resist using those, probably because they weren't entirely representative but were such an extreme that they did have that startling effect that reminds you who these people were,' Faust said in the magazine article, 'and that they are not you.' "

Oh, no, Ms. Faust, you're SO much better than those awful people.

Gag me with a soup ladle.

[miss kelly]

Meant to include a link for above:

http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2007/02/11/fausts_path_to_harvard/?page=2

[Miss Grimke]

Drew Gilpin Faust is a Girl Scout and a lady. She understands better than you Yankee women what it's like to be a lady. You are just reading her writing so that you can pick it apart and try to show that you are smarter than she is. Bless your hearts you try.

[Miss Grimke]

I forgot to put in a link to the DGF fan club

[Miss Grimke]

Link to fan club