Faustian Bargain?
[posted by Callimachus]
Heather Mac Donald is mighty down on Drew Gilpin Faust as Harvard's new president, saying her hiring "openly signaled that Harvard will now be the leader in politically correct victimology."
But she bases this on things other women said and did at symposia and institutes that Faust oversaw. Well, if you want to knock out every academic who ever had her name atop a program where someone said something controversial, that will be a quick game.
I've read a lot of Faust's work, and I rather expected her to draw fire from the other side of the political spectrum, when postmodernist English departments, victimology fetishists, and "Lost Causer" witch-hunters realized she made a career, in part, out of seeing white ante-bellum Southern slaveholders as real, complex human beings, not straw people stuffed with racist evil.
Heather Mac Donald is mighty down on Drew Gilpin Faust as Harvard's new president, saying her hiring "openly signaled that Harvard will now be the leader in politically correct victimology."
But she bases this on things other women said and did at symposia and institutes that Faust oversaw. Well, if you want to knock out every academic who ever had her name atop a program where someone said something controversial, that will be a quick game.
I've read a lot of Faust's work, and I rather expected her to draw fire from the other side of the political spectrum, when postmodernist English departments, victimology fetishists, and "Lost Causer" witch-hunters realized she made a career, in part, out of seeing white ante-bellum Southern slaveholders as real, complex human beings, not straw people stuffed with racist evil.
Labels: academics, Drew Gilpin Faust, historians
