squeezed out: Summers falls

For those who understand:
this story

Harvard University's embattled president, Lawrence H. Summers, resigned this afternoon and will be replaced, on an interim basis, by Derek C. Bok, who was president of Harvard from 1971 to 1991. Mr. Bok was chosen to "clean up the mess and make conditions right for the next president," said a senior professor with knowledge of the tumultuous events of today in Cambridge, Mass.

Mr. Summers, who had been buffeted by controversy for more than a year, was expected to resign on Monday, the professor said, and this morning's Wall Street Journal said his resignation was imminent.

Google news is a good source but one can get lost easily in the midst of news items. However, I've managed to find an interesting piece on Summers, written by a PolSci prof, who is trying to refute the claim that Summers has fallen victim to the left-wing professoriat:

Economics and business at Harvard flourished under this former Treasury Secretary and World Bank vice president. One conscientious Harvard economist, Richard Parker, couldn’t get the administration to remove the name of former Sotheby’s auction emporium chief Alfred Taubman from Taubman Hall after his federal conviction, imprisonment and cynical self-celebration in Christopher Mason’s The Art of the Steal. Even more galling was Summers’s support of economist Andrei Schleifer after his conviction in the Russian bond mess. And there was his somewhat more amusing indifference to the 2005 arrest of economics professor Martin Weitzman, caught neglecting the standard market practice of paying for goods by swiping the latest of several truckloads of horse manure from a neighboring farm.

Meanwhile, a 20 year veteran Harvard maintenance man was demoted and had his pay cut by a third for shouting at a supervisor. And student protestors had had to occupy University Hall for weeks (shortly before Summers became president) to win a minimum $10 wage for tearfully grateful Harvard employees.

It was priorities like that, not the petulance of the politically correct, that turned even faculty moderates against Summers. His interim replacement, former president Derek Bok, is everything a defender of liberal education should be, but Summers’s departure doesn’t answer these big questions:

Will American universities keep governing themselves as communities of scholars, independent of political and market riptides, or will professors be employees in a cockpit of global-capitalist management? And will great undergraduate colleges keep nourishing American civic-republican leaders virtuous enough to save capitalism from itself, as they’ve sometimes had to do? Or will colleges be morphed into crucibles of a global ruling class accountable to no polity or moral code?

I just love the first selection - Jim Sleeper's idea of compassion is pretty pathetic actually.
In regard to the second: oh, please, give me a break. Just like in that invaluable Soviet joke, I have already quoted on another occasion - anyone can go the Red Square and shout 'down with Nixon'. It's easy to keep screaming 'down with Bush' while you at academia but try to shout 'down with Chomsky/Faucault/Derrida' see what happens to you.