Larry Summers ran the white flag up the crimson flagpole, announcing that he would step down as president of Harvard.

Larry Summers ran the white flag up the crimson flagpole, announcing that he would step down as president of Harvard. News stories revisited this or that episode from his tenure--his remarks on the scientific achievements of women, his run-in with Cornel West--but Summers did not go because he was edgy, or out-there, or abrasive. (He apologized copiously for his--entirely defensible--comments on women.) He went because the faculty of arts and sciences decided he was not "one of us," they vowed to have his head, and the Corporation caved. Camille Paglia put it best in an op-ed for the New York Times: "Over the last three decades of trendy poststructuralism and post-modernism, American humanities professors fell under the sway of a ruthless guild mentality.... Harvard did not begin that blight but became an extreme example of it." Summers was a standing affront to their pieties. Harvard has shown that it will uphold the old faith until the last post-structuralist gives the eulogy for the last post-modernist.