FASCINATING, AND POSSIBLY A GOOD OMEN – AT 12:40 P.M. ET:   You may recall that Harvard is looking for a new president.  But what kind of president?  It's easy to fear that, given the current fads in higher education, the country's most influential university might choose a trendy, hip, member-of-the-right-group symbol.  The cocktail-party set in Boston would love it.

But wait a second.  Can it be?  The New York Sun, an excellent online paper, has discovered the names of some of the leading candidates, and they don't fit the expected picture:

BOSTON — Harvard University will choose its next president in the coming weeks. Surprises are always possible, but the search looks like it’s headed in a direction that tells a story of national, even international significance. Among the leading contenders for the job are reportedly the:

• dean of Harvard Business School, Nitin Nohria, whose bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering is from the Indian Institute of Technology.

• president of the Broad Institute, Eric Lander, whose undergraduate and graduate work were in mathematics and who was a professor at Harvard Business School and in MIT’s biology department before founding Broad, which does health-related genetics research.

• dean of Harvard’s faculty of arts and sciences, Michael Smith, whose Ph.D. in electrical engineering is from Stanford.

• provost of Harvard, Alan Garber, an economist who has an M.D. from Stanford.

• president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, a 1991 graduate of Harvard Medical school who was featured in this past weekend’s New York Times as a big pal of Harvard presidential search committee member and billionaire David Rubenstein.

Notice any common themes emerging?

Three of the past five presidents of Harvard were trained in the humanities. Nathan Pusey was a classicist. Neil Rudenstine is a scholar of Renaissance literature. The outgoing president, Drew Faust, is a historian.

Harvard hasn’t had a scientist or engineer as president since James Bryant Conant stepped down from the job in 1953. It appears as if the university is ready for another one.

COMMENT:  Read the whole thing.  The Sun documents the collapse of the Humanities and Social Sciences into a scrap heap of leftist ideology.  Many of our colleges are becoming public embarrassments.  "Social justice," which means justice only for selected groups, is the new motto.

Maybe Harvard, by choosing a practical, mature, scientifically literate president, can signal that some good change is coming.

February 6, 2018