Civitas

Roth’s narrative blasts at full throttle through the idiocies and injustices of political correctness, and this is particularly relevant given that in the unmargined world a different faction of the political correctness lobby is hounding another dean out of office. In January, Harvard’s president Larry Summers suggested there might be biological reasons which contribute to the low proportion of female professors in the sciences. Mr Summers, a brilliant economist, had previously been criticised for his managerial style and now the schadenfreude of his enemies has become unmistakable. The debate has been rehearsed here before but it has now reached a new level, as Camilla Cavendish observes in her trenchant column in yesterday’s Times.

Summers’ position has now been rendered all but untenable by a no confidence vote of 218-185 by members of the faculty of arts and science. Although Harvard Students for Larry rejected the vote, saying that this ‘demonstrates a complete rejection of the major tenets of academic freedom’, their anger about such censorship is unlikely likely to sway the myopic academics. It is incredible that he might lose his job for saying what he did. Then again, as Roth said of the difficulty facing novelists in the modern age, reality is constantly outstripping even our wildest imaginations.