Ouch

I have two favorite quotes for January 27, 2005. Here’s the first one:

[Larry Sumners] thought he was speaking in a place that encourages uncircumscribed intellectual explorations. He was not. He was on a university campus.

Heh.

And this bit, too:

MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins. . . “felt I was going to be sick. My heart was pounding and my breath was shallow.” And, “I just couldn’t breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill.” She said that if she had not bolted from the room, “I would’ve either blacked out or thrown up.”

Is this the fruit of feminism? A woman at the peak of the academic pyramid becomes theatrically flurried by an unwelcome idea and, like a Victorian maiden exposed to male coarseness, suffers the vapors and collapses on the drawing room carpet in a heap of crinolines until revived by smelling salts and the offending brute’s contrition?

Both snippets are from the same George Will column.