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HeteronormGate: Day 2, or “Harvard Hates Heteronormativity”

Heteronormgate.com is still available- should I reserve it?

Anyway, a day has passed since the breaking of the shocking allegations, and there have been quite a few developments:

- The original Harvard Crimson story, infamously, left out the actual quotes by Pinkett Smith. Here’s what she said, from an earlier Crimson story:

"Women, you can have it all—a loving man, devoted husband, loving children, a fabulous career," she said. "They say you gotta choose. Nah, nah, nah. We are a new generation of women. We got to set a new standard of rules around here. You can do whatever it is you want. All you have to do is want it."
"To my men, open your mind, open your eyes to new ideas. Be open," she added.

Wow, how shocking! Controversial! Subversive! Some would even call it… liberal!

- Drudge linked to the piece yesterday afternoon, likely causing the Harvard Crimson office to go nuts when hundreds of blogs subsequently attacked the story. It’s gotta be embarrassing for this group of likely overworked and underpaid (unpaid?) college newspaper editors, and especially the writer- although I’ll bet within three years she’ll be on the national staff of the New York Times.

- Here's an op-ed by a former officer of the student organization that first raised this, who essentially rips the whole "heteronormative" idea to shreds.

- Here are the first “MSM” treatments of it; though neither the Boston Herald nor Page Six adds much to the Crimson version.

- The greatest absurdity of all, of course, is that people attending the world’s most prestigious university believe that they have an unalienable Right to Never Feel Bad. The problem with the whole college PC regime- well, one of the problems- is that you get out of college into real life, and things suddenly stop working that way. It’s an absurd story, of course, but it is entertaining, and if it helps to draw attention away from the Summers brouhaha, then all the better.

This reminds me of the time during my Brandeis days when former New York Mayor Ed Koch was brought in as a visiting professor to teach a political science course (I didn’t take the course, but several of my friends did). Now normally when students would say something in class that was stupid and/or ignorant, the reply from the professor would be along the lines of "I respect your opinion, but..." Not Koch. He would respond to the assembled idiots, every day, with "you're wrong, you don't know what you're talking about.” I hear Koch handled the city council much the same way when he was mayor, but I digress.

A girl in the class wrote a “Koch is a jerk” op-ed in the Justice, and Koch’s reply was classic: “She thinks I’m tough? Wait until she gets into the private sector.”

As Harvard students, these people are likely to end up in the upper reaches of that same private sector. And I’ll bet, at some point, they’re going to have to deal with the boss talking about his wife.

Posted by Stephen Silver at March 4, 2005 01:45 AM