“Well, she should be made to smell the glove…”

Well, at least we know who to turn to to continue the strip when the individual who does Mallard Fillmore dies.

Naming a woman with so few credentials (I’m familiar with her impressive academic career, but so far as I can tell it really only includes teaching and advising positions, along with being Dean of the Institute)

First of all, I don’t think they could’ve handled a non-internal-candidate. She was chair of the exploratory committee that resulted in the fallout from Summers’ comments on women and science, which put her at the forefront of Harvard politics. She oversaw Radcliffe’s transition from a defunct college to productive institute. She’s also a respected researcher and teacher (this shouldn’t be overlooked, because the folks she’ll be leading care). She’s totally grounded in Harvard’s system.

Harvard’s a university, not a corporation, or governmental organization. Academe has a very peculiar structure. Harvard, for all its prestige and money, is still a traditional university. She doesn’t need a laundry list of non-academic accomplishments. Frankly, her first job is to get the faculty to stop boiling long enough to get them on the next ship to the new Allston colony… I mean, campus. And to do that, the faculty is going to have to like her, and they’ll like her better if she talks like one of them.

As for the other candidates: maybe they just didn’t have great ideas for the University. A lot of this is image and PR, but there’s a chance that Faust actually wowed the Search Committee and Corporation with her intellect, insight, passion and gravitas. Maybe they see something in her; they grilled her for half a year. She wasn’t my favorite candidate, but I have some (possibly misplaced) faith in the judgment Search Committee (and the fact that half were highly accomplished women, two of whom were college/university presidents themselves).

Still and all: this IS going to be like watching an misogynistic trainwreck. Specifically one running across the Charles River.

Faust has carved out a niche for herself all-too-typical of the intellectual provincialism characteristic of many of this generation’s scholars, having fashioned a career scribbling about vacuous constructions of “gender” and “ritual” during a time period in which they had little acknowledged meaning.

Is the implication there that gender didn’t acquire meaning until people started challenging the dogma of traditional roles? And that before that, of course, everyone was just acting the way god intended, so it didn’t mean anything.

It hurts me not to make a Faust joke, but that will be my penance for the time I unwittingly made fun of zuzu’s last name ;)

oh p.s. defenestrated = trillian.

In 2001, as Dr. Dunn was stepping down as acting dean of the Radcliffe Institute, the remnant of Radcliffe College, which had been absorbed into Harvard in 1999, Dr. Faust became the dean. She made major organizational changes, cut costs and laid off a quarter of the staff, transforming Radcliffe into an internationally known home for scholars from multiple disciplines.

“We used to call her Chainsaw Drew,” Professor Warren said.

I think she’ll do an excellent job. Just because she doesn’t have a stereotypically “masculine” leadership style doesn’t mean she can’t lead effectively.

Those quotes from the Crimson are disgusting. She spoke at Bryn Mawr’s commencement six years ago, and her speech was considerably better than Summers’ public speaking engagements.