Harvard University’s graduate students have held their own vote on the two resolutions regarding Lawrence Summers passed recently by the Harvard faculty. The motion of no confidence in Summers failed narrowly. The vote to censure Summers for his remarks on women passed overwhelmingly. The Boston Globe plays the narrowly failed no confidence vote as some sort of victory for Summers.

I don’t see it that way. Too little attention has been paid to the second resolution, censuring Summers for his remarks on women. This was passed comfortably by the faculty and overwhelmingly by the graduate students. For Summers to be censured by Harvard’s faculty and graduate students for remarks that were utterly reasonable as stimulants to debate–and put forward in exactly that spirit by Summers–is shameful. Lately the faculty has been downplaying the math remarks and focusing on complaints about Summers’s governance. That’s because they know the public is appalled by their attempts at censorship. But let’s not forget that the faculty, and now the grad students, have comfortably passed resolutions censuring Summers for his remarks on math and women.

That the grad students have censured Summers overwhelmingly affirms the core problem of today’s academy. Undergraduates are getting more conservative. Unfortunately, that will not make for change. Now that radicals have gained control of the academy, the tenure system will enable them to reproduce themselves indefinitely. The Globe has missed the story here. The news is not that the grad students very narrowly failed to follow the faculty censure motion. That was just a belated attempt to peel back Harvard’s evident humiliation at this gesture, so reviled by the public. No, the real news here is that on the matter of Summers’s remarks about women, America’s future professors are even more censorious than the faculty.