Seed Magazine has a write-up on Larry Summers' departure as President of Harvard. Summers stepped down a few days ago, after it became clear that continued dissatisfaction with him amongst certain faculty members in the College of Arts & Sciences would prevent him from executing his plan for revitalizing the university. As you may recall, Summers (accidentally) provoked a fury of criticism when he suggested at a closed academic conference that women may be less inclined towards scientific work because of innate differences between the sexes.

One part of the report on Summers catches him channeling C. P. Snow:

In a February 2004 speech to the Harvard-Radcliffe Club of Southern California, Summers emphasized the need for the university's students to be well-versed in the life sciences. "If you didn't know the name of five plays by Shakespeare, you would be embarrassed to admit it," he said. "But if you didn't know the difference between a gene and a chromosome, that's a technical subject.”

Of course I've talked about an almost identical statement by C. P. Snow before. The sad part is that Summers was apparently deeply committed to improving and maintaining the quality of life science research at Harvard. His clumsy style and mismanagement of the whole innate-differences-between-the-sexes row is now hard to overlook, but I do hope that whoever replaces him at Old Crimson maintains his personal commitment to the physical and life sciences.