The latest news from the world of academia is the dis-invitation to Lawrence Summers at UC Davis due to the protests of several faculty. Summers, you might remember, was forced out as president of Harvard because he made some politically incorrect remarks attempting to explain the dearth of women in the hard sciences.
The decision to dump Summers as the speaker at the dinner was abrupt. His name was on the dinner invitation that went out Aug. 31, along with other information about the three-day meeting at UC Davis, Davis said.
"The dinner is an informal, social occasion, with more of a conversation with the speaker than a formal talk," he added. Blum, who is the husband of California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, made the original decision to invite Summers.
Susan Kennedy, chief of staff for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, will replace Summers as speaker at the dinner.
While delighted that the regents have decided to replace Summers, [Maureen] Stanton [leader of the petition drive to disinvite Summers] now hopes the dispute will be quickly forgotten.
"Frankly, we'd like to see the story just die at this point," she said.
Citizens, especially parents of college age or soon-to-be college age children, should be aware that all to often this is what passes for diversity in academia. Despite the constant hymns of praise to "diversity" by academics, a disturbing number of them are like Maureen Stanton, willing to organize and complain to shut down ideas that make them uncomfortable. Asserting a desire for "diversity" they really are attempting to clear the marketplace of ideas of any idea that threatens the leftist orthodoxy on campus.
If we really wanted to challenge the assumptions of the typical college student, what we'd do is immerse them in ancient and medieval thought, as nothing challenges modern assumptions like ancient Greek thought or the Thomist Scholastics. Instead students educated in "diversity" often get nothing but warmed over modernism in the form of cultural Marxism.
Update: See Stanley Kurtz on Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind. Kurtz reproduces this quote from a reader of Bloom's book.
I love this book because it was the first one that really ever humiliated me the first time I read it, and because it signaled to me just how little I actually knew — but not because I identified with it. I remember reading it and thinking how little I really knew about anything important discussed in the book. All I had to counter Bloom with was a collection of pop-culture platitudes.
And the truth is that I didn't know anything, and that was a good lesson to learn: because there are times in this life that you might have to "press the reset button" for yourself and return to Square One. If you ever have to do that, I can think of a lot of people much worse than Allan Bloom to help you out.
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