1100 Throwing bad money after worse
Usually you say throwing "good money after bad" to mean wasting more money than you already have in hopes of recovering a loss, but I don't think Harvard's President can win at all at this "woman problem" because the team he's on, the liberals, have created it. Now he has created a $50 million flush fund (I started to type "slush" but slipped, and think I like this one better) for gender diversity when Harvard has already spent millions beating the bushes looking for qualified women and minorities."Even Harvard’s bottomless resources cannot buy a miracle, however. So instead of a magician, the university has brought forth the next best thing: a report on “diversity” that, like all such products, possesses the power of shutting down every critical faculty in seemingly intelligent people. For connoisseurs of diversity claptrap, Harvard’s just released “Report of the Task Force on Women Faculty” is a thing of beauty, a peerless example of the destruction of higher learning by identity politics. Because the report will undoubtedly serve as the template for future diversity scams in colleges across the country, it’s worth studying." City Journal's Heather MacDonald. McDonald outlines the plan: 1) Collective amnesia; 2) a new bureaucracy; 3) subdivide the Big zero into little zeros; and 4) rechristen all the diversity words.
I don't really care how Harvard chooses to waste its private alumni funds, but you just know this will slop over eventually into the federally funded grants for science and research and state supported schools (i.e. you and I will end up paying for this folly). Less qualified candidates are going to receive research grants, tenured faculty positions, and appointments on university committees just because he let slip in public what most people, even women, believe. Men and women are different. Not unequal, but different. This means down the road, a woman will receive a worse education or carry an untreated disease because Lawrence Summers blabbed the truth.
I'm already feeling more safe, listened to, and valued, aren't you?
Full report of the Task Force here.
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2 comments:
Wondering about your quote on open source.... How do you feel about open source? Considering the problems with ready packaged library software, I like the idea of "tweakable" software. Do you approve of open access journals?
The article is from Forbes and is about open source software as a business model, i.e., doesn't work. As taxpayers we've been paying for research journals at a number of levels. Cutting out the publisher's profits will only reduce that cost in part. The researchers will still need grants; the labs will still need to be built; the hardware and software designers will still want a cut; the lawyers and licensing theirs; the IT people will still need to be paid; the librarians will probably still want to feed their children, and so on. As much as librarians like to think there is a free lunch if we could just get evil capitalists out of the picture, there ain't.
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