Former Harvard head Summers nixed as UC regents dinner speaker

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Lawrence Summers, the controversial former president of Harvard University, has been replaced as the planned speaker at a UC Board of Regents dinner next week after complaints from faculty members.

"(UC Regents) Chairman Richard Blum and Dr. Summers talked last Thursday and agreed that the regents would have a different speaker," Trey Davis, director of special projects for the UC system, said today.

Davis was unable to say whether a protest letter signed by more than 300 people from the university system had any effect on the decision to find a different speaker for the regents' dinner in Sacramento Wednesday. He referred those questions to Blum, who is out of the country.

Summers, who was treasury secretary under President Clinton, resigned from Harvard last year after a long-running clash with some faculty members over his questioning whether women might not have the same innate ability as men in disciplines such as science, math and engineering. He also had thorny relations with minority faculty members during his time at the university.

While Summers later apologized for his remarks, which he said were misinterpreted, it didn't slow the criticism, which continues to this day.

"I was appalled and stunned that someone like Summers would even be invited to speak to the regents," said UC Davis Professor Maureen Stanton, who helped put together the petition drive. "I think many of us who were involved in the protest believed that it wouldn't reflect well on the university that he even received the invitation."

The petition called Summer's invitation "not only misguided but inappropriate" at a time when the university is working to diversify its community.

"Inviting a keynote speaker who has come to symbolize gender and racial prejudice in academia conveys the wrong message to the University community and to the people of California," the petition said.

The decision to dump Summers as the speaker at the dinner was abrupt. His name was on the dinner invitation that went out Aug. 31, along with other information about the three-day meeting at UC Davis, Davis said.

The University of California system has hired Marxists and other assorted nut jobs(to give speeches) but economist Larry Summers is too controversial for the tenured radicals to give a speech! It's not like Larry Summers is a registered Republican or a libertarian who doesn't believe in government supporting education.He's just Larry Summers mainstream Democrat who said a few politically incorrect things.Is there a diversity problem at California higher education?