Posted by
KsReaganite on Wednesday, February 03, 2010 12:00:00 AM
Only a Massachusetts law professor who ran Michael Dukakis’ campaign could come up with something which is so comical, condescending, and nonsensical all at once.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_commentary/commentary_by_susan_estrich/the_value_of_diversity
Most American women, like their male counterparts, are too busy with their jobs, families, and volunteer work to worry about who sits on the board of directors of each of the companies whose products they use in day to day life. They simply don’t have the luxury of unproductive time that, evidently, an overpaid Harvard faculty member does.
Frankly, only a law professor from Boston could be so presumptive as to think that she/he can best determine the qualifications of those eligible to sit on the board of directors of a publicly traded company. Perhaps spending all that time in the confines of the People’s Republic of Massachusetts has made Professor Estrich forget that here in America, unlike in the former USSR, it is the shareholders who decide who sits on the board of directors of a company. If Estrich is an Apple shareholder, she is more than welcome to vote for her choice of a candidate or even run herself for that company’s board. Given her track record in running campaigns, however, I doubt she will be up to it.
Campaign rhetoric is cheap, even when disguised as conscientious outrage. It is lost on Susan Estrich and her fellow inhabitants of the towering ivy cocoons that Apple is a technology company and fewer and fewer Americans of either gender are getting into graduate level programs in computers and engineering. Amidst this dwindling supply of available talent and potential leadership, men outnumber women almost three to one.
The solution to this problem lies, of course, in the determined push for K-12 educational excellence that will help boys and girls both to come out of high school prepared to embark on college majors in the sciences, technology, and engineering. That kind of preparation requires the kind of rigorous performance driven academics that liberals like Professor Estrich have spent a lifetime resisting in the public school system. A casual look at the demographics in the computer science department in any major university will make it clear to impartial observers that the majority of students are from those supposedly backward parts of the world where homework, testing, and mastery of abstract concepts is admired, rather than derided, in public education.
Rather than presume to dictate who can sit on the board of Apple, Ms. Estrich is better off putting her considerable influence behind the efforts to reform our public schools so that they can produce girls and boys who are well equipped for careers in the hard sciences, engineering, and computer technology. From amongst this crop of young women and men, someday will emerge senior leaders in technology companies who will take their place at the table by sheer merit.
Merit!! What a novel concept for liberal lawyers from la-la land.