Alright so I think I am going to talk today about two things that have been bothering me. First the not so serious one: I absolutely can not stand people and their random abbreviation of words and phrases. For instance, why must people refer to professors as profs, political science as poli sci, international relations as IR, constitutional law as con-law, or parliamentary debate (I am much more sympathetic to this one because of the difficult nature of its spelling, but still) as parli. It is annoying on a number of levels, first of all, only certain people should be able to abbreviate terms, because otherwise you just look like a poser. For example, a first-year college student in his first semester/quarter has no right to call professors profs. They are only calling them profs because they have seen other people do it and are doing it only to adapt a lingo they feel makes them an insider. The other aspect of pointless abbreviations that bothers me is its use for exclusiveness. I may have read plenty of international relations material, but if someone yammers on and on about IR it could mean nothing to me. They are merely using the term to show that they talk about international relations so often that they get the right to call it IR. Furthermore, if someone asks what IR means they are automatically going to look like an uninformed jackass, which has nothing to do with knowledge of an acronym. Gar.

So the second issue, and one of much more significance, is the ridiculous controversy over Larry Summers comments on females in science. For those unaware, Summers is the president of Harvard and gave an off the record speech before the National Bureau of Economic Research addressing the relative lack of women in faculty positions in math and science. All he said was that it could be possible that women do not seek out jobs in the sciences because of innate differences. Now like two or three women at the conference got upset and made a big to do about it. Unfortunately the press went wild with it because people are not supposed to say that, regardless of their intent. Now many at Harvard are capitalizing on the political incorrectness of the statements and going at Summers. This is unfortunate because Summers was only making an observation that he felt could be a reason for the differential. God forbid people make observations. Let’s give Summers a break and realize that what’s important is not the political incorrectness of a sound-clip, but the intent of the remarks, which were in no way discriminatory. If one good thing comes out of this controversy that just will not go away, it could be this realization, but that is probably me just be optimistic.

-Mr. Alec

PS Tommrow I think I will write a mission statement for this Blog, so as to give it some much needed direction.