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Drooling on the Pillow

Monday, March 07, 2005

Something in the Water 

Sorry, I can't stay away.

The Times is still printing Larry Summers gaffe-related letters like the following:
To the Editor:

In trying to refute one of the arguments of Lawrence H.
Summers, Harvard's president, for the paucity of women
in the higher echelons of mathematics and engineering
departments, W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm
apparently commit their own Summers-like gaffe.

They wrote that "athletic talent or musical genius may
be gifts of the gods (or genes)." I thought that athletic
excellence and virtuosity in performance required years
of intense, dedicated practice, just as scientific knowledge
requires years of college and beyond. The genes or the
gods alone are hardly sufficient.

Frank Brady
Brookville, N.Y., March 1, 2005
The writer is an associate professor of
education, Long Island University, C. W. Post Campus

I thought being even an associate professor of education means that you know how to read a simple sentence. Talent is to excellence as genius is to virtuosity, but the regimen Mr. Brady describes defines the difference between them. They're not really the same things.

For those with high school seniors in the house I need to point out that this is the second letter from the faculty of the C.W. Post campus of Long Island University we've needed to deal with in the past week.

Posted by: Sluggo / 12:31 PM
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