Reader, you may see this post as not directly concerning you and yet it really does concern you. It really does.
When I
ran this post on Faust, I felt something was wrong with her but couldn’t quite pinpoint it and so wrote nothing more. That this lady should have been rushed into the job, after
the vilification of Lawrence Summers, seemed to smack of “Them”.
“Them” is different things to different people – PC mafia, moral relativists, feminists, Marxists et al – but the agenda’s the same and I kept returning, over and over, to Woodrow Wilson [1913]:
"Some of the biggest men … are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it."
and Churchill [1920]:
"[T]his world wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence and impossible equality, has been steadily growing … It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the nineteenth century, and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads."
It is the greatest foolhardiness and misreading of history to suggest that because Churchill was speaking then of communism, the threat exists no more. It very much does, only in its latest manifestations. So it was no surprise to read
Sissy Willis’ own post on the Harvard takeover and if someone were to subsequently bring out that Faust is a dignitary in some group like Eastern Star or whatever, it would equally not surprise:
"The feminist takeover of Harvard is imminent," writes Heather MacDonald at City Journal. "Faust runs one of the most powerful incubators of feminist complaint and nonsensical academic theory in the country. … [This] confirmation, could not have more clearly repudiated Lawrence Summers's all-too-brief reign of meritocracy and academic honesty Harvard will now be the leader in politically correct victimology." Nonsensical academic theory - I wrote on this here and here, the latter with, admittedly, only 70 linked references but how many do you need?
Christina Hoff Sommers’ equity feminism is one thing and as a male, I can hardly blame the women for sticking up for their sisters but Feminism was given a capital F and hijacked along the way by those very forces just alluded to:
"The women at the Heilbrun conference are the New Feminists: articulate, prone to self-dramatization, and chronically offended. Many of the women on the "Anger" panel were tenured professors at prestigious universities. All had fine and expensive educations."
Behind Faust’s seemingly mild views lie assumptions which are terrifying in their full implications for policy and for academic programming:
# I guess I've been studying unpleasant people or politically incorrect people for my whole academic career.
# it's very important to understand how individuals in the past rationalized lives that we might find unthinkable …
# My daughter, a committed vegetarian, now tells me that in a hundred years none of us will ever believe that we were eating meat.
# It is important to celebrate people but not to do so uncritically. By celebrating people in an uncritical way we only make them removed from ourselves . . .
As Sissy says: “Who but politically correct Marxist "thinkers" would ever dream of "celebrating" people uncritically?” And I add that Faust’s stated and implied feminist agenda for Radcliffe may well be arguable to a $300 million point but her takeover of all of Harvard, male and female alike, is nothing short of execrable.
Finally: "Whether it's back in the gulags of the old USSR, in the inimically orchestrated "street" of today's Arab tyrannies or in the politically correct, ivy-covered towers in our own backyard at Harvard, intimidation is the blogtheme that keeps on giving."
And intimidation is what we’re all facing now, from the evil of ID cards through to enforced views in the halls of learning.
Earlier post here.
Nummerngirls: "Miss zu sein, heißt nicht, ein Model zu sein, sondern ein Repräsentant", sagt Katie Steiner, die 23-jährige Miss Norddeutschland
