In just a few hours, we'll see President Summers as the Student Symposium opens, and Ex Parte will be there. In the meantime, it's been announced that he will face a faculty no-confidence vote. It's not all bad news, and it highlights the outlandish perspective of many of his critics:

[S]ome professors said that any measure of this kind would be unlikely to pass and others privately said that the language of this specific motion is too controversial to garner widespread support. Many faculty members have spent hours this week discussing other ideas for resolving the crisis of confidence in Summers...

J. Lorand Matory, professor of anthropology and African and African American studies, said he has secured a spot for his motion on the agenda of the March 15 meeting, although he said he hasn't finalized the language because he is still consulting with colleagues.

The draft also has three paragraphs of explanation that refer to several Summers controversies: the memo he signed while working at the World Bank in 1991 suggesting that Third World countries were underpolluted; his support for the Reserve Officers Training Corps on campus, despite a ban on gays serving openly in the military; and his criticism of signers of a petition for divestment from Israel as ''taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect, if not their intent."

It criticizes Summers's "apparently ongoing convictions about the capacities and rights not only of women but also of minority populations, third-world nations, gay people, and colonized peoples," the explanation says.

Such specific complaints, and especially language such as ''colonized peoples" -- a reference to Palestinians -- make many of Summers's critics uncomfortable, although several declined to be quoted yesterday about Matory's statement.

Unbelievable! Apparently supporting the presence of ROTC is now enough to lead the faculty to ask for your resignation.