Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz referred to professors who pressured the resignation of Larry Summers as "Stalinist" on the Paul Sullivan Show on WBZ radio in Boston last night.

Dershowitz also said that "the inmates are running the asylum." The noted civil libertarian probably wouldn't be offended if you called him a "card-carrying member of the ACLU." He's no right-winger. However, he is a true liberal, something we see fewer and fewer of. He wrote recently:

This is truly a time of crisis for Harvard. The crisis is over whether a politically correct straightjacket will be placed over the thinking of everybody in this institution by one segment of the faculty.

Summers has been criticized for, among other transgressions, refusal to divest from Israel, suggesting innate biological differences may explain differing achievement in science between men and women, a brash management style, and perhaps worst of all: patriotism. He refused to prohibit military recruitment on the Harvard campus.

When not busy rebuffing left-wing idiocy, Summers grew Harvard's endowment to $25 billion and ended grade inflation. Harvard received a record number of applications this year, at a time when many schools are having recruitment problems because of the lower number of college-aged people in the US.

Not surprisingly, the UK's liberal Independent proved as tone-deaf to the changing world as Harvard's Arts and Sciences professors:

Oddly, Mr Summers' largest pool of support appears to have been among students. A poll by the student newspaper found that fewer than one in five undergraduates and graduates thought he should step down, while 57 per cent believed he should stay. (Emphasis added)