The American Spectator

p> CONTINUING EDUCATION br> Re: George Neumayr’s Summers is Over : /p> p>Another very fine piece, this time on Lawrence Summers, who is really on the ropes, I’m afraid, and for all the wrong reasons. Interesting to me that someone like him, so silver-tongued and I always thought pretty decent as Sec. Treas. under Clinton, should have run so badly afoul of the harpies, harridans, fakers, wastrels, and low-crawlers that populate the Ivy League these days. As I recall, they were the ones who wanted him and set great store by his coming to Harvard. Just goes to show you: make one wrong move in academia these days — altho’ so far not so much in my alma mater Washington & Lee — and offend one blinkered dingbat with a bad case of righteous rage, and you’re dead. Yeesh. br> — Tony Outhwaite br> New York City /p> p> George Neumayr, in “Summers is Over,” says repeatedly that the problem with the Harvard faculty is that they don’t care about their students. This is an unfortunate, yet all too common, misstatement of the grave crisis in today’s academy. What Mr. Neumayr should have said is that the professors don’t care about education . They care plenty about their students — way too much in fact. Today’s universities are “student-centered,” revolving around student’s expressed and perceived needs and desires to the exclusion of the fundamental mission of the university, which is the transmission of knowledge. See, for example, Kay Hymowitz’s article, “J Crew U,” in the spring 1996 City Journal