The resignation of Lawrence Summers from the Harvard presidency provides an occasion for serious reflection on his fate and related subjects. In the new issue of the Weekly Standard, George Mason University Law School Professor Peter Berkowitz focuses on President Summers's refusal to defend himself: "Summers's end." Berkowitz writes:

What should Summers have done? From the beginning he should have stuck to his guns, and failing that, he should have come to his senses after summer vacation last year and uttered words similar to those supplied by attorney Harvey Silverglate, writing in the Boston Phoenix two days after Summers's resignation:

This was about more than whether I speculated in an area in which I am not a recognized expert. It was about whether the modern American academy is any longer a safe haven for true diversity of thought and opinion, and whether some subjects are so toxic to a subsection of the academic left that they are taboo. We extol the virtues of diversity in a wide variety of programs--including mandatory freshman orientation and "sensitivity training" programs that come perilously close to being exercises in thought-reform--but we penalize diversity of knowledge and opinion. I was not immune to these forces, as exhibited in my shameful attempt to buy off my critics with a $50 million bribe for a laundry list of senseless initiatives compiled by two women's task forces that will do little more than further expand an already bloated administrative structure. I hereby declare that initiative dissolved. The unspent money will go to endow a much-needed and long-overdue chair in academic freedom at Harvard Law School.

The utterance of these or some such words might not have been the height of prudence. But Summers could have made himself a hero.

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[T]he problem was that Summers was untrue to his sound instincts about the university's mission and unable or unwilling to articulate the principles that should organize and refine those instincts. Despite his considerable gifts, the bright promise when he was appointed in 2001, his evident joy in Harvard's remarkable students and his varied achievements during his five years at the helm, Summers's failure to stand up for himself and for the principle of free inquiry when both were under assault--indeed, his collaboration by means of public acts of abasement and contrition before those who would cut off speech and research in order to protect their own tender sensibilities and political agendas--leaves Harvard more enfeebled and more confused about its mission than when he arrived.

Elsewhere in the issue, Manhattan Institute senior fellow James Pierson takes a look at the faculty enemies of President Summers, and at the Harvard Corporation members who must have orchestrated his ouster: "Harvard lays an egg." Roger Kimball captures elements of both of these excellent articles in his brief Armavirumque post: "Larry Summers, sacrificial beast."

I badly wanted President Summers to fight back in the manner outlined by Berkowitz. Had he done so and still been sacked, I would have attributed his ouster to the fight. Yet President Summers refused to fight. He more or less proceeded to observe the taboos that constrain the university more rigidly than the Victorians' alleged prudishness over sex ever constrained Victorian public life. One lesson we can take from his ouster is that harboring incorrect thoughts is a crime that cannot be atoned for in the eyes of the university's ideologues of "diversity."