Harvard president Lawrence Summers has become famous for attracting criticism, censure, and generalized antagonism; he has also, in the process, become famous for refusing to be beaten into rhetorical submission by his ideological opponents. In the past, Summers has taken flak for criticizing Cornel West, for disapproving of petitions for university divestment from Israel, and for being friendly to campus ROTC programs. Over the winter, the problem was his willingness to speculate about whether intrinsic differences between men and women may account at least in part for the comparatively small numbers of women to be found in engineering and the hard sciences; this week, the issue is whether he is insensitive to the plight of Native Americans. The Harvard arts and sciences faculty has voted "no confidence" in Summers, but he does have strong, vocal supporters. Some of them have created a t-shirt in Summers' honor. For $12 plus shipping costs, you, too, can be the proud wearer of a "Viva Summers" t-shirt. On the vivasummers.com website, which features a portrait of a grinning Summers accepting his own personal shirt, the creators note that no communist revolutionaries were harmed in the making of their product.

It seems at this point that Summers could not read a weather forecast without being accused of insensitivity at the least, and malice at the worst, towards some group. Now we have the retroactively affronted stepping forward. The balkanization of the academy continues, and the rest of the nation wonders more and more if there is a point to all of this.