Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Summers' fall.
James Traub writes the best piece I've seen yet on Larry Summers' resignation. Here's the intro:
eta: Matt Yglesias explains some of the more substantive reasons Summers lost support among the faculty.
I have a soft spot for Larry Summers, who resigned yesterday as president of Harvard rather than face the humiliation of being fired. I admit that I develop a soft spot for almost everyone I spend 25 or 30 hours interviewing, as I did in Summers' case three years ago when I wrote a profile of him for the New York Times Magazine. I can't say that I found Summers' manner beguiling, or even prepossessing; he seemed, if anything, only barely socialized. But that's what I liked about him. Most university presidents are high-minded, silver-throated, and stupefyingly banal. Not Summers: The first time I heard him speak, when he was still Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, he said something like, "There are two views on this subject, A and B, and I know I should say the truth lies between them. But it doesn't: A is right and B is wrong."(Here is my prior post re Summers.)
eta: Matt Yglesias explains some of the more substantive reasons Summers lost support among the faculty.
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How do we know the people you cite are right? At Harvard we were taught the ability to see right and wrong and look beyond the inability of others to discern the same. Do they teach logic at DU?
Hank
'89 Law '92
Hank
'89 Law '92
# posted by 
: 8:00 AM
: 8:00 AM
Yglesias went to Harvard, so he must be right. And I don't think the finals clubs are teaching logic much. They have a different core competency.
Someone reacted to the Traub piece over at DeLong's blog by complaining that DeLong was only posting positive pieces about Summers. Is calling a university president "barely socialized" really positive? I wouldn't have thought so.
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