From today's New York Times is the latest about the crisis at Harvard over Larry Summers. Yesterday a faculty meeting was held to discuss Summers's leadership at Harvard:

"Many of your faculty are dismayed and alienated and demoralized," Dr. Arthur Kleinman, chairman of anthropology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, said at the meeting, referring to a "crisis concerning your style of leadership and governance."

Please. "Alienated" and "demoralized"? Over what? How do these folks ever weather the storms of academic publishing? Idiotic referee and editorial decisions are made all the time which require a thick skin. Perhaps the good folks at Harvard never receive rejection letters and are therefore supersensitive to the "storm of controversy" that Larry Summers has unleashed.

But the fragile flowers haven't had their full say yet:

The 90-minute meeting ended with a unanimous vote to hold an emergency meeting of the faculty next Tuesday so professors could continue to discuss their lack of confidence in Dr. Summers's leadership.

Great. A whole week of lunches, wine spritzers, and "tsk tsk"ing about how Larry Summers has set women back fifty years or some such nonsense. What a shame.

The folks who are so outraged about the statement of a hypothesis are supposed to be the best of our best. This, in my opinion, is the bigger scandal of the Larry Summers speech - the best scientists and academics in the world have been revealed to be nothing more than scared and small.

However, there were two voices of reason at the meeting. One was an Larry Katz, an economist. No surprise there. The other? A professor of Yiddish literature? Good on 'ya!!

One of two professors who spoke in support of Dr. Summers was Ruth R. Wisse, the Peretz professor of Yiddish literature, who said her colleagues were allowing sexual politics to silence the open discussion Dr. Summers intended when he spoke about women at a conference last month, The Crimson reported.

How quickly the left turn against their own - kinda like it was in another country about eighty years ago.