I was a studious little creature, striving to make good grades and impress people. One day, when my parents had guests, they were bragging a bit about my grades. One of the guests, a woman, asked where I intended to go to college. Frankly, I knew the name of few colleges. No one in my family had ever gone to college. However, one college was known by everyone. "Harvard," I piped up.

Of course everyone laughed. At the time, only boys were allowed to go to Harvard. I was both confused and embarrassed. I recall that as a day when I first became aware of inequality between the sexes. Obviously, I felt, I could not go to the top school in the nation. Did that mean that my opportunities were limited and I could not shape my future to match my ambitions?

I never did attend Harvard or any other college. It would be only after I had married and had a child that I would actually go to college. However, I am very glad to see this day when Harvard, previously closed to women, now has a woman president.

...if your college administrator ever says that women are too emotional, the women in the audience should react as emotionally as they possibly can.

So stomp your feet, pound your fists and threaten to cry if he doesn't apologize immediately. This will demonstrate that his statement was wrong.

Summers got drummed out unfairly because he actually dared to speak out about a touchy gender issue, so much for academic freedom. And, oh yeah, only women are allowed to criticize men, but never the other way around. So much for equality too.

I sure hope they apply such high and exacting standards to this new clown and ALSO drum her out the moment she makes any comment that can in some universe be considered disparaging against men, even if she did not mean it. I look forward to this new game.

This is why I and the majority of America thinks academia is a sad sick joke. They are nothing like they claim to be and they are antithetical to the idea of AMERICA, of freedom to speak one's mind and to base decisions on concrete reason, not capricious and arbitrary female emotion. It all goes back to when a woman like Doris Lessing says it, it deserves a Nobel Prize, when a man like me says the same exact thing, I am attacked. I do not want to live in a world like that, nor does any sane man, and anyone who stands in the way of FIXING THIS DISASTER is, to me, an enemy of mine. This includes any woman or man who disagrees with me.

To Drew Gilpin Faust. Hopefully her tenure will not be ended by a politically correct lynch mob like her predecessor's.

Hopefully her tenure will not be ended by a politically correct lynch mob like her predecessor's.

I'm hoping it will, so we can STICK IT to the hypocritical, unfair, fascistic feminists.

I went to Harvard and was almost crushed twice, by the debt and by class. I'm just folk, even today. My nearest neighbors are a welder and a sweat shop seamtress who can afford her house because it's public housing. There are 4 races who live on my block. So, when I arrived at Harvard, it seemed a brave new world, that had such people in it, but the holidays are a reductive way to explain my experience there: my classmates would jet away to Prague or Thailand. I stayed and drank coffee with the security guards.

"You can afford to go," my classmates asserted. "You just choose to not go."

And that's what they thought they knew. Rather, that's the faity tale they told themselves so that they could sip coffee in Prague without a hitch.

“It is the final triumph of a system of domination when the dominated start singing its virtues.”

-Ngugi WaThiong'o, Decolonizing the Mind

Brightstar65 is actually comparing his writing here at Salon to that of Doris Lessing and implying that he deserves a Nobel Prize. The next thing you know he will want to be president of Harvard.

Good luck in all your really, really incredible future ambitions blightstar.

Do you boys like spend every 5 minutes checking in on Broadstreet to find a way to lay an early misogynistic statement onto every comment thread? Don't you have jobs, or lives?

I'm waiting with bated breath for Anonymouse(TM) to show up and "hyperbolically" explain how this is related to other feminist sites that bash his hero Glen Sacks. Should be within the next 20 minutes or so.

Really, it was a (slightly better than most) pretty standard pompous academic politician type blather. Well, I rather liked the The essence of a university is that it is uniquely accountable to the past and to the future – not simply or even primarily to the present. bit. But rather old hat, which is what such ceremonial speeches are supposed to be.

Not something I'd be wishing someone would lose their job over. And how hateful to wish that they'd lose their job over what they are, not what they do. Over their structure of their genitalia, not the content of their character as it were.

There is a word for that.

AK Smith, what a coincidence! As a studious schoolgirl, I too was asked where I wanted to go to school, and I said that I wanted to go to Harvard and join a fraternity.

Naturally, I was laughed at.

I earned my Ph.D. at Harvard AND earned 100% of my own expenses AND paid off my student loans. My best friend and I became the first two female grad students to become members of the Hasty Pudding. So, I -did- actually fulfill my childhood dream.

No, it wasn't easy. It's never been easy. But I was as proud the day of President Faust's inauguration as I was the day I graduated.

There will be more of us. Lots, lots more.