Backlash against Faust

Written by a fan of "public history" - Faust has carved out a niche for herself all-too-typical of the intellectual provincialism characteristic of many of this generation’s scholars, having fashioned a career scribbling about vacuous constructions of “gender” and “ritual” during a time period in which they had little acknowledged meaning.

Anti-Faust conjurers predict the future - Stephen H. Balch... said that he feared that Faust would push to use gender and perhaps racial criteria in hiring and tenure decisions. “The greatest worry”, Balch said in a statement, “is that as president, Faust will further ratchet up the pressure on Harvard’s great scientific research centers to subordinate personnel decisions to the needs of social engineering.”

Her name seems to be a byword for group preferences - Drew Faust ... head[ed] a Task Force on Women Faculty. That Task Force won a $50 million commitment to increase faculty “diversity efforts” at Harvard. In the past, the call for such “diversity” has been a code name for greater ideological conformism, since those appointed through it are expected to share the ideological premise that brought them the job.

She keeps company with a bad crowd - Faust runs one of the most powerful incubators of feminist complaint and nonsensical academic theory in the country.

I am ashamed to admit that I care more for Civil War history than for Harvard. If she ruins that place, I don't care. The ACW books she has written needed to be written; the example she now sets the public historians needs to be set; if her example can influence the direction of Civil War history towards analysis, monographs and cross-disciplinary work, that's long overdue.

Meanwhile, if a brand-name college collapses into faddish navel-gazing, that is a problem for the alumni, not society at large.

Am I polarized, yet?