Those faculty no-confidence votes intended to punish Harvard President Larry Summers for failure to tow the political correctness party-line did result in Summers’ resignation, but all the Harvard faculty’s PC fun is going to have a cost: $100,000,000 dollars.

Oracle’s Larry Ellison had been plannng a very large donation, but he had signed no papers; and, absent Summers, Ellison is striking Harvard off his Xmas list.

Following the resignation of Harvard president Larry Summers, Oracle boss Larry Ellison has decided not to donate over $100m to the university after all.

Ellison’s cash was to fund research into the quality of worldwide government healthcare problems, and according to Oracle’s spokespeople, Ellison viewed Summers’ participation as critical to the study.

“In light of Summers’ resignation, Larry Ellison has decided to reconsider his decision,” a spokesman told Reuters. “There was never a formal agreement but it had been talked about.”

Harvard Economics professor Greg Mankiw reports that, at a recent faculty meeting, President Larry Summers confessed:

I have been troubled, and I believe you should be troubled, by survey data suggesting that student satisfaction at Harvard is much closer to the bottom than to the top of any list of leading American colleges, and that the relative satisfaction of our students declines with each year that they are here.

Noting that the Harvard Crimson had reported only days earlier Harvard’s unequalled admissions yield percentage, Mankiw reflects:

It is an odd business that has customers who are simultaneously unhappy about the product and eager to buy it.

Hat tip to PJM.

Boston Magazine attributes Summers’ demise to bad manners.

When visitors came to his office, Summers propped his feet up on a table, sometimes with his shoes off. He often appeared in public with a toothpick dangling from his mouth. He repeatedly mangled the names of people he was greeting or introducing. If someone said something he deemed uninteresting or foolish, he would conspicuously roll his eyes. Other times Summers would stare into space when being spoken to, as if no one else were in the room. “Larry’s always looking away,” says one junior professor. “At first you think he’s scanning the room for someone more important, but no, he’s just looking away.” And then there was the recurring problem of his eating and talking at the same time, during which Summers sometimes sprayed saliva on his audience….

The Harvard Crimson… repeatedly noted how Summers’s lack of social graces impeded his interaction with students and faculty. The new president’s manners, or lack thereof, were so widely discussed that student reporters were really just transcribing an omnipresent campus conversation.

Summers also had a bizarre habit of falling asleep in public. Eyewitnesses caught him dozing at a talk by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, a lecture by United Nations head Kofi Annan, a speech by Mikhail Gorbachev in Sanders Theatre, a service at Harvard Hillel, and a festival celebrating cultural diversity.

When he was more engaged by speakers, Summers often acted derisively toward them. At one fall 2001 meeting with the law-school faculty, a female professor asked a question that Summers didn’t think much of. “That’s a stupid question,” he responded. Later that autumn, he brusquely terminated an interview with a female journalist from the Financial Times after a disagreement over whether his remarks were on or off the record. Just as they had at Treasury, his aides insisted that Summers’s style was typical of the intellectual free-for-all that characterized economics seminars and that people shouldn’t take it personally. Inevitably, they did.

So great was the bewilderment over Summers’s lack of social skills that some in the Harvard community wondered if there might be a clinical reason for his behavior: a neurobiological disorder called Asperger’s syndrome.

But today’s Wall Street Journal front page story hints that the Corporation really abandoned Summers because the Harvard president, already under fire from the left, failed to defend Harvard’s invaluable money management team, led by Jack R. Meyer, in a controversy last year when bolshies criticized their compensation:

According to people familiar with the situation, Mr. Summers also alienated Jack R. Meyer, who until last year was chief executive of Harvard Management Corp. The group oversees Harvard’s endowment and posted strong gains under Mr. Meyer’s tenure. He and about 29 others in the fixed-income group left the affiliate last year. Although it wasn’t the catalyst for his departure, Mr. Meyer was disappointed Mr. Summers didn’t stand up to alumni who criticized some employees’ pay, these people say. The controversy reached a head in 2003, when the top two HMC investment managers earned $35.1 million and $34.1 million, respectively.

Meyer’s mananagement team increased the portion of Harvard’s endowment they administered by an average of 16.1% per year over a decade, growing it by billions (from $4.8 to $22.6 billion over the period from 1990 to 2004), so Summers’ failure in this department was no simple symbolic culture wars’ defeat. Harvard stands to lose an incalculable amount of asset growth as the result of Summers’ cowed posture in response to personal damage sustained in previous quarrels with the left.

Larry Summers is resigning (under faculty fire) as president of Harvard. He had been brought in by the Corporation, in the Spring of 2001, as a representative of Clintonian Democratic Party centrism, with the goal of wresting that university’s management and destiny out of the hands of representatives of the aberrant culture of leftwing radicalism which has flourished in post-1960s academic institutions the way kudzu flourishes beside Southern highways. Summers was given a vote of no confidence by the faculty of Arts and Sciences last March as punishment for a mild remark speculating on the possibility of intrinsic gender differences playing some partial role in the smaller numbers of females working as professionally as mathematicians, scientists, and engineers.

In the 18th century, tyrannical presidents of the great American colleges first ruthlessly purged faculties and student bodies of New Light deviationists from Congregationalist Orthodoxy, then later when the Great Awakening prospered, also purged the Old Light survivors of earlier efforts at uniformity.

Summers’ defeat deserves to be viewed as a modern repetition of the ancient struggles at Harvard and Yale over the fine points of theology. Summers represented the worldly and optimistic party of affirmative Democratic governance, adaptable to post-Reagan changes in the national agenda, reconciled to the necessities of the free market, and committed to technocratic pragmatism. He is being driven out by a consensus loyal to a culture of conformity in thrall to leftist extremism, committed to the politics of ressentiment, the apocalyptic condemnation of Euro-American history, and to the rejection of market capitalism.

When Summers dared to criticize Afro-American studies professor Cornell West and suggested that popular notions of feminine victimhood might possibly be exaggerated, the result was much as if one of his 17th century predecessors had ventured upon criticism of Predestination, and expressed doubts concerning some of the articles of the Augsburg Confession. Summers’ defeat represents indubitably the triumph of a reactionary orthodoxy at Harvard, and an explicit rejection of the idea of a reconciliation between the academic community and the diurnal political reality of America in the 21st Century.

Scott Johnson of Power Line links an Investors Business Daily editorial which notes:

Representatives of autocratic theocracies that finance terror, oppress women and consider homosexuality a capital crime are welcomed at Harvard and other campuses. But not the U.S. Marines.

Harvard red crimson in tooth and claw department:

Does Harvard need its own glossy life-style magazine for the sophisticated coed? Two Harvard sophomores thought so, and each produced her own.

Scene — a would-be Vanity Fair for 02138 Ivies, founded by a no-nonsense art history major who interned at YM in ninth grade — hit the Harvard campus Thursday morning [12/1]. Freeze — a CosmoGIRL! for the Crimson coed, founded by a fast-talking government major who’s into romance novels and Audrey Hepburn — launches Dec. 9. Both mags are written, edited, photographed, and designed by Harvard undergraduates. Both are light reads, downtime diversions with columns on sex and clothes modeled by students.

Comparison:

WHY?

To readers from Scene co-editors Emily Washkowitz and Rebecca Kaden:
”We think of Scene as what is missing from the standard Harvard tour. It is not Harvard as reputation holds, but the Harvard as we, the students who make it, know it. It is an attempt to capture the detail — to portray the events, the people, the passions and the talents that make up the experience that we are all a part of.”

To readers from Freeze editor Thea Sebastian:
”I believe in escapism. I believe that world politics and micro-finance are important, sure. But sometimes, we all need to relax. . . . Fundamentally college kids need something their OWN. They need a periodical that specifically targets THEM — and bridges that crucial gap between Friday night football and 9-5 America.”

WHERE?

Scene’s New York chic: from ”Wearing Deco”

”The Chrysler Building is an icon of the Manhattan skyline. But for Lewis A. Remele ’06, an Art History concentrator, it’s an inspiration for a cocktail dress.”

Freeze’s Boston schtick: from ”10 Perfect Dates in Boston”

”The Mapparium: One of Boston’s most awe-inspiring sights, this is an absolute must for any winter date.”

WHO?

From Scene’s ”The 10 People on the Scene You Ought to Know”

”Jack McCambridge is probably the most widely known name on the Harvard campus. He seems to do everything — a leader on the Harvard Concert Commission, involved in the UC and the Harvard AIDS Coalition, President of the Fox, the list goes on.”

From Freeze’s ”10 Hot Harvard Men”

Peter Wood on his first kiss: ”I was in eighth grade at the time. I vividly recall spending about an hour the night before making out with my hand to practice.”

WHAT?

From Scene’s ”Ready for Takeoff”

”Where is a hipster to turn for some cerebral pop music? Chances are Sufjan Stevens didn’t come to mind for most people, but it’s about time that you make that adjustment.”

From Freeze’s ”Embarrassing Moments”

”One day, in the middle of the summer, my friend dared me to take off my entire bathing suit, while swimming at a horribly crowded public beach. . . . Well, to make a long story short, we searched for my bikini pants for about an hour.”