A woman to lead Harvard?
If there’s a presidential search that comes in second as the most talked about one (behind the 2008 one, of course), it could the one underway at Harvard. The Harvard Crimson and the New York Times today are fascinated with the idea of a possible woman president.
Could she be the next leader of Harvard? Ruth Simmons, the president of Brown, is reportedly a candidate.
The Crimson article revealed the delicate politics of lobbying for a female president. Evelynn Hammonds, who leads efforts to make Harvard more woman-friendly, declined to comment for the article. And other women on faculty spoke anonymously:
“I think a lot of us are concerned that the harder we push publicly, the more backlash there will be,” says a senior female professor in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the search process. “We don’t want to impair the chances of the really excellent women who are in the pool.”
Playing “the gender card” only generates resistance against appointing women to leadership positions, the professor says, so she and others believe it’s more effective to lobby for particular female candidates with “quiet pressure” behind the scenes.
The article also quotes MIT’s Nancy Hopkins, who got the word out to reporters about Larry Summers’ controversial women-in-science comments, saying that it would be unfair to the woman if she was appointed, or seen to be appointed, to “make up” for those comments. Besides, a female president, she said, wouldn’t necessarily make the climate better for women at Harvard.
The NY Times piece chimed in with a similar message: Harvard professors are more concerned with finding a consensus builder.
Why Americans don’t care about global warming
I had a great time sitting on the patio of a café in Harvard Square on Saturday basking in the May-like weather, while the poor folks in Denver were digging out from yet another wacky snow storm. An article yesterday in the Times speculates that this kind of wide variation in weather in the US is a reason why Americans seem to care less about the specter of global warming than Europeans. It goes on to qualify:
This is not a testable hypothesis, and the experts note that many other factors contribute to varied attitudes on the issue, ranging from contrasting cultural and political biases to different levels of dependence on oil and coal or the industries that profit from them. But they do see the climate issue compounded here by how normal it is to have abnormal — and very different — conditions around the country.
Funding woes
More grim news about stagnating science funding from Washington. The physical sciences, as usual, are going to take a hit, according to this Times article yesterday. This is happening in spite of President Bush’s promise last year to double funding for science as part of the American Competitiveness Initiative so many will no doubt be disappointed.
Should he stay or should he go?
We’ll find out soon if Tom Finneran gets to keep his job as head of the Massachusetts Biotech Council, even after he (former speaker of the MA House of Representatives) pleaded guilty on Friday to felony charges of obstruction of justice.
Turns out, according to this Globe article, he has some supporters who want him to stay. For lobby groups like the MBC, political connections are everything. But just how far is the MBC willing to go to tap into those connections?
And some research news:
Later this week at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, two Harvard astronomers will discuss a new method for looking for signs of extraterrestrial life using a telescope now under construction in Australia (see photo). This telescope will look at lower frequencies than existing telescopes involved with SETI projects. These would be the same frequencies used in Earthly technologies like radar and broadcast TV.
The Mileura Wide-Field Array being built in Australia (Credit: Frank Briggs, Mt. Stromlo Observatory)
You can find the researchers’ paper here and the Globe article here