July 3, 2006 -- "Someone finally put a price on political correctness:
$115 million.
That's the tidy sum that Harvard won't be getting because its PC-obsessed faculty drove the school's president, Larry Summers, out of office.
Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison pledged to give Harvard some $115 million. It would have been one of the most generous gifts ever given by a single individual to an academic institution.
But Ellison announced last week that he was rescinding his offer.
Why? The shabby way Summers - to whom Ellison had promised the money - had been treated.
Summers - who served as Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton - is no conservative. But he still ran afoul of the campus' hard-left faculty on several occasions.
For one, he insisted that tenured black studies professor Cornel West actually spend some time teaching.
Imagine that.
West complained about "lack of respect" and departed for Princeton.
The final straw was Summers' observation at an academic conference about the preponderance of men in the hard science and math fields. He urged the attendees to think outside the box and consider the possibility that men were different than women.
Cue a wave of PC outrage: Academic freedom, it seems, no longer stretches so far as to permit the questioning of feminist dogma. Summers was obliged to backtrack and grovel for forgiveness.
By then, it was too late - the insurgency against Summers had begun.
He finally resigned.
Well, the faculty got their pound of flesh - even over the strenuous objections of students.
But the damage to Harvard has been immense.
To its reputation, of course.
And now to its bottom line.
Yes, it has one of the largest endowments of any university in the country.
But $115 million would have been the largest single gift in Harvard's history.
Will the PC faculty learn from this calamitous misjudgment?
Don't count on it."
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Being slow on the uptake, it was with a constant query-at-the-ready that I returned to the working world, as there were just some things I couldn't understand.
People under the age of 30, and in relatively important jobs were, well, really dumb. It wasn't until my adventures took me aboard the University of Florida's campus that I began to realize that what passes for an education these days is nothing more than a diversity-impacted scrum of weaselness heaped upon weaselness that took the place of a well-rounded learning experience. The High School and Colleges of today are for the most part where active minds go to die, as they are encumbered with concepts so alien to the true human condition that the central nervous system shuts down in the attempt to make sense of it all. A student can be out of his league and still given high grades, teachers can dismiss reality and replace it with visions of Neverland, and after having spent some time with football players who couldn't spell cat if you spotted them the C and the T, I can in all honesty report that today's student athlete is as incredibly stupid as ever.
All anyone knows about is DIVERSITY. The modern version of the word, of course, not the true meaning of what different people with different ideas can add to the mix, but the fashionable definition that doesn't imply, but carves in stone the premise that minorities are the ONLY diverse members of society, therefore they are to be exalted on high. Clocks would stop, trains wouldn't run, airplanes would fall from the sky were we to return to promoting the idea that effort produces results and those with the better results get the better rewards. Of course random chance plays an important part in all of our lives, a business owner in danger of bankruptcy hits the lottery and all is well...that sort of thing, but, generally speaking, reaping what you've sown has been tossed out the window and replaced by step-stools so that dwarves may score too.
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