Larry Summers Feels His Own Pain:

The highlight of the Harvard President's latest craven speech denouncing himself for insensitivity had to be this personal anecdote:

Summers added that professors need to be aware of the great influence that positive or negative signals can have on their students. He said he had been drawn to economics but also was dissuaded from some other fields ''by experiences where I lagged slightly and where I was made to feel inadequate."

He described an occasion when he gave the wrong answer to a physics question and ''the person who saw my answer looked on with a certain stunned belief that I could be so stupid."

For some reason, I'm reminded of the scene in Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic where the Black Panther spokesman at conductor Leonard Bernstein's infamous fundraising party for the Black Panthers says:

"Like the other day I was coming out of the courthouse in Queens and there was this off-duty pig going by ... see ... and he gives me the finger ... and for some reason or other, this kind of got the old anger boiling... you know?"

"God," says Lenny [Bernstein], and he swings his head around toward the rest of the room [which is full of Manhattan's social and media elite, such as Barbara Walters, Julia Belafonte, and Otto Preminger] "most of the people in this room have had a problem with being unwanted!"

Self-pity is the hallmark of leftism, and Larry is finally getting in the Lenny spirit. If only that physicist hadn't looked at Larry funny when he gave the wrong answer, then Larry's fragile spirit wouldn't have been crushed and he wouldn't have had to become Harvard's youngest tenured economics professor and Secretary of the Treasury. That's the spirit!

A professor writes me:

What I find ironic about this concern with sending signals that turn students away from certain disciplines is that in all my years as a student, the only time I was made to feel inadequate was when I expressed an interest in becoming a sociologist specializing in race. It was made very clear to me that, as a white male, not only was I not welcome in that field, but I was congenitally too stupid to understand the profound mysteries of Blackness, or Femaleness for that matter if I might turn my interest to Women's Studies. The "Need Not Apply" sign wasn't just posted, it was shoved in my face.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer