Larry Summers has resigned as President of Harvard, ahead of a no-confidence vote among the academic staff of the institution. In his Letter to the Harvard Community he writes:

I have notified the Harvard Corporation that I will resign as President of the University as of June 30, 2006. Working closely with all parts of the Harvard community, and especially with our remarkable students, has been one of the great joys of my professional life. However, I have reluctantly concluded that the rifts between me and segments of the Arts and Sciences faculty make it infeasible for me to advance the agenda of renewal that I see as crucial to Harvard’s future. I believe, therefore, that it is best for the University to have new leadership.

Harvard’s greatness has always come from its ability to evolve as the world and its demands change – to educate and draw forth the energy of each successive generation in new and creative ways. Believing deeply that complacency is among the greatest risks facing Harvard, I have sought for the last five years to prod and challenge the University to reach for the most ambitious goals in creative ways. There surely have been times when I could have done this in wiser or more respectful ways. My sense of urgency has stemmed from my conviction that Harvard has a special ability to make a real difference in a world desperately in need of wisdom of all kinds.

The surprising thing is that he has lasted this long, given the complacency and political correctness of the Harvard humanities establishment. There’s a good analysis of his ‘mistakes’ in the NYT. Mistake No. 1 is “If the board says it wants you to ‘shake things up’ and ‘bring change,’ don’t believe them.” After taking sabbatical leave, Summers will return to Harvard as an ordinary prof. Well, as ordinary as he can manage anyway.

Alan Dershowitz, the celebrated law professor, is profoundly irritated by what’s happened. “A PLURALITY of one faculty has brought about an academic coup d’etat against not only Harvard University president Lawrence Summers but also against the majority of students, faculty, and alumni”, he wrote in the Boston Globe.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which forced Summers’s resignation by voting a lack of confidence in him last March and threatening to do so again on Feb. 28, is only one component of Harvard University and is hardly representative of widespread attitudes on the campus toward Summers. The graduate faculties, the students, and the alumni generally supported Summers for his many accomplishments. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences includes, in general, some of the most radical, hard-left elements within Harvard’s diverse constituencies. And let there be no mistake about the origin of Summers’s problem with that particular faculty: It started as a hard left-center conflict. Summers committed the cardinal sin against the academic hard left: He expressed politically incorrect views regarding gender, race, religion, sexual preference, and the military.

It’s worth noting that Summers was wildly popular with Harvard students, possibly because of his views that (i) the professorial community wasn’t terribly interested in providing Harvard’s student ‘customers’ (who pay upwards of $50,000 a year) with much in the way of ‘service’, and (ii) something should be done about that.

From today’s Independent Online…

In the event of all-out nuclear war, the BBC was to distract the nation by broadcasting a mix of music and light entertainment shows, secret papers released by the Home Office reveal.

Hundreds of security-vetted BBC staff and a select band of unnamed radio artistes were to be clandestinely dispatched to transmission sites across the country at the first signs of international tension.

Just before the first missiles had reached Britain, the BBC was to use regional centres in Birmingham, Sheffield, Bristol and Middlesbrough to broadcast a national service that the Government hoped would create “a diversion to relieve strain and stress”.

I’m reminded about the jokes that used to circulate in the 1960s and 1970s about “things to do during the four-minute warning” [that the UK population was supposed to get before the nukes detonated]. My favourite was “Buy A Renault 4 and watch it rust”.

Well, well. An amazing report on BBC Online on how a fleeting placement of Flann O’Brien’s surreal novel, The Third Policeman, on the cult TV series, Lost, has led to an upsurge in sales.

More than 15,000 copies were sold in the three weeks following the Lost episode airing in the US – equalling sales of the previous six years.

O’Brien (whose real name was Brian O’Nolan) played a big role in what might loosely be called my literary development, in that I was once thrown out of the National Library in Dublin because I had been reading back numbers of his Cruiskeen Lawn column in the Irish Times and was overcome with uncontrollable, hysterical laughter. A stern custodian escorted me to the door. I had been obliged to resort to the National Library because my mother regarded the Irish Times, the house organ of the Protestant Ascendancy, as a publication of the devil, and would not — as she put it — “have that heathen rag in the house”.

There are two good Wikipedia pages on O’Brien — one about his novels, the other on his newspaper column, but by far the best online reference is Carol Taaffe’s splendid essay.

For such an outrageously funny and original man, O’Brien seems to have had a pretty miserable life — as captured in the title of Anthony Cronin’s workmanlike biography — No Laughing Matter: the life and times of Flann O’Brien. He died in 1966.

Hilarious piece by David Pogue in the NYT. Sample:

Eventually you will get to a person. You will tell him/her why you are calling, and most likely you will be told you have to call someone else. They will offer to transfer you, but before they do, GET THE EXTENSION NUMBER. This is very important, especially when (not if) you get cut off. Note that it is a seven-digit extension number.

While waiting, pause and ponder the size and complexity of a company that needs an extension number the size of your phone number.

Now you are getting close. You will eventually get to someone who after getting your name, address, problem, and again, Express Service code, will say the magic words, “I can help you with that problem.” You have now contacted a Dell Offshore Personal Expert – a DOPE.

Some notes on this part of the process:

* The DOPE will probably call you by your first name, because he/she wants to be your new best friend.

* He/she will profusely thank you at every step of the way for the same reason.

* He/she will have a notable American name like Patrick, Matthew or even a Shaun. Do not react to this.

But congratulations; YOU HAVE REACHED SOMEONE WHO IS TRYING TO HELP YOU! You reached the ninth circle, and all you have to do is return.

AOL is holding A Discussion (capital letters) on a portentous topic — Is the internet a good thing or a bad thing? I only know about it because Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s Svengali, was on Radio 4’s Start the Week this morning talking about it. Apparently, Alastair has decided that the Internet is here to stay. Phew! Meanwhile, now that AOL is in discussion mode, how about another, equally relevant topic? Is Electricity A Good Thing?

The “let’s discuss the Internet” meme is spreading btw. I’m speaking next Thursday in London at the RSA Economist debate on the motion “The Internet’s best days are over”. I’m down to support the motion. Yikes! I’m developing lawyer-like tendencies. Dr Johnson once observed that “lawyers are like dice, in that they can lie on any side”.

Er, I always knew there was method in my somnolence, but now there’s scientific evidence to support it!

When it comes to making tough decisions – don’t sweat it, sleep on it – or so a team of scientists recommends.

A Dutch study suggests complex decisions like buying a car can be better made when the unconscious mind is left to churn through the options.

This is because people can only focus on a limited amount of information, the study in the journal Science suggests.

The conscious brain should be reserved for simple choices like picking between towels and shampoos, the team said.

Zzzzzzz….

French Health Minister Xavier Bertrand trying to reassure consumers that poultry remained safe to eat. [link]

There’s something deeply comical about the tangle Hollywood has got into over Brokeback Mountain, the so-called “gay cowboy” movie. Basically, the problem is that the awkward fact of homosexual love at the heart of the story has to be somehow finessed so that it becomes Motherhood and Apple Pie. Daniel Mendelsohn has a lovely piece about it in the New York Review of Books. He notes:

The reluctance to be explicit about the film’s themes and content was evident at the Golden Globes, where the film took the major awards—for best movie drama, best director, and best screenplay. When a short montage of clips from the film was screened, it was described as “a story of monumental conflict”; later, the actor reading the names of nominees for best actor in a movie drama described Heath Ledger’s character as “a cowboy caught up in a complicated love.” After Ang Lee received the award he was quoted as saying, “This is a universal story. I just wanted to make a love story.”

What’s going on, Mendelsohn maintains, is a concerted attempt to situate the story in a well-understood and respectable genre — the Romeo and Juliet story: lovers doomed to be destroyed by horrid families, tribal jealousies, race or whatever. The difficulty is that Brokeback Mountain is about two boys who happened to love one another but whose lives were destroyed not by traditional scapegoats but by the hostility of their society (US mainstream society, that is) to their sexuality.

It will be interesting to see how the Oscars ceremony handles this delicate problem.