There's an article about Howard Gardiner in the new issue of Harvard Magazine in which Gardner lashes out at the Bush administration...and here in National Review, Jay P. Greene blasts Gardner for his opinions.

In HM, Gardner says, “The right wing isn’t just taking over the country, it’s shanghaiing all our values. If there’s a Republican administration after the next election, I would join in efforts for some sort of secession. It’s not the same country anymore.”

Greene writes in response,

What would make him, and officials at Harvard, comfortable threatening secession in the alumni magazine? One possibility is that they think these comments actually appeal to the alumni. They are probably mistaken. While President Bush is no more popular among Harvard alumni than among other groups of east-coast intellectuals, talk of secession is almost certainly a bridge too far. The current student body and key alumni show no signs of wishing Harvard to stray into fashionable radicalism.

We know this from their reaction to the forced resignation of University President Lawrence Summers. Summers attempted to rein in some of higher education’s more extreme nonsense...

Lawrence Summers tried to restore to Harvard the notion that patriotism and academia were not incompatible. Howard Gardner’s comments in the alumni magazine are an attempt to move the ball in the opposite direction. The newly appointed Harvard president, Drew Gilpin Faust, has not yet indicated the course she would like Harvard to take. Will Harvard once again stand for the Union?

The point, I suppose, is to put Drew Faust on guard: The conservatives are watching.