OBIT ON SUMMERS STILL PENDING

The New Republic has a piece on the sad demise of President Larry Summers written by
Martin Peretz. A bit of the flavor of the article follows:

I know something about the Harvard academy's propensity for self-pampering and self-importance. And the problem with Larry Summers is that he never joined what the American cultural critic Harold Rosenberg devastatingly called "the herd of independent minds." Summers's arrival at Harvard was bracing. The Harvard Corporation had finally decided to bring the university into modern times, and it had chosen an at once dazzling and sober intellectual to do it. You could feel the walls of the faculty club tremble. Well, the walls of the club that serves the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), anyway. This is an important distinction. There are other faculties at Harvard--law, medicine, public health, business, et cetera--and it's hard to find more than a handful of professors at these places offended by what Summers has said or done. They, in fact, have been cheering him on. So, in forcing Summers's resignation, the FAS, in an alliance of frightened souls and hyped-up orators, has pulled off a coup--facilitated by the fact that hard scientists, true social scientists, and serious humanists lack the inclination to go to conspiratorial caucus meetings......

The rest is for subscribers only, but my question about the whole episode is why Summers caved to a bunch of people than Alan Dershowitz, no mean slouch in the left-leaning department, described as people who regard him [Dershowitz] as a right-winger.

Why did Summers surrender to a bunch of scheming apodictic idiot-savants who act like scholastic schoolmen when addressing social issues [medieval is what I'm getting at], and why didn’t the Corporation support him in his hour of need?

Inquiring minds would love to know.....