Or, the $50 million misunderstanding, cont'd: "Harvard's Faustian bargain." Heather Mac Donald is the essential chronicler of Harvard's descent. Her linked column brings us up to date on the announcement of Harvard's president-in-waiting, one Drew Gilpin Faust.

In June 2005 Mac Donald rose to the challenge of performing a close analysis of the rubbish in Harvard's Report of the Task Force on Women Faculty. She slogged through the report's deadening bureacratic mumbo jumbo with a scholar's patience and with a satirist's gimlet eye. She translated the report's lifeless bureacratic prose into English and exposed the numerous errors and fallacies in its argument.

The report was of course the blueprint for Harvard's $50 million Danegeld to be paid to the female faculty members who had demanded the head of former President Lawrence Summers on a platter. At the time we called it the $50 million misunderstanding. Mac Donald updates the story with the most recent installment of a continuing saga.

Posted by Scott at 08:49 PM  |    |