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http://www.nationalreview.com/ 14 February 2005 (? - Phil)

Summers Storm: A feminist show trial at Harvard

By Professor Christina Hoff Sommers

In the course of an informal, off-the-record talk before a group of
academics, Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard University, unwittingly
touched the third rail of university politics: He speculated that innate
differences between the sexes might be one reason there are fewer women than
men at the highest echelons of math and science. That gender is socially
constructed by the patriarchy is a not-to-be-questioned tenet of campus
ideology. And here was Summers daring to raise doubts about it.

Camille Paglia, University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the
University of the Arts in Philadelphia, describes the intellectual climate
of today's academy: Rigid social constructionism so remains the dominant
dogma in American humanities and social-sciences departments that to
question it even an iota brings the thought police out in shrieking mobs to
your door. Now the mobs, in full cry, are after the president of Harvard
University.

The conference at which Summers spoke was organized by the National Bureau
of Economic Research. While many members of the audience found his remarks
measured and thought-provoking, a few were deeply offended that he
entertained the idea that natural differences between men and women played a
role in career paths. I felt I was going to be sick, said MIT biologist and
feminist activist Nancy Hopkins. My heart was pounding and my breath was
shallow. I was extremely upset. Professor Hopkins fled the room before
Summers finished speaking and would soon be reporting her wrenching
experience to the Boston Globe.

Also in attendance was Denice Denton, the dean of engineering at the
University of Washington who is about to become chancellor of the University
of California, Santa Cruz. Summers infuriated Denton by daring to speak as
he did before a group of the country's most accomplished scholars on women's
issues. His remarks, she said, have provoked an intellectual tsunami. Unlike
Hopkins, she stayed in the room to argue with Summers, reporting proudly
that she spoke truth to power.

Denton says that her phone has not stopped ringing and emails are flying.
She and her sisters-in-arms are working hard and successfully to keep their
tsunami going. They seem to be hoping that it will do for gender bias in the
academy what the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas episode did for sexual
harassment in the workplace. But Hopkins, Denton, and their supporters have
already come in for their share of public criticism. There has been a spate
of articles and opinion pieces in the New York Times, the Washington Post,
and other venues expressing strong disapproval of their tactics and of their
benighted opposition to all discussion of innateness. Even Today Show host
Katie Couric found it hard to understand why Hopkins had rushed out of the
room. Couric asked her pointedly: Well, did anyone question him and
challenge him? It's not like you are all shrinking violets, after all.

All the public disapproval, however, has little effect inside the
universities where any perceived slight to inclusiveness provokes organized
and sustained outrage. Summers is in serious trouble and he knows it.
Outsiders may be jeering at Hopkins and Denton, but the galvanized Harvard
Faculty of Arts and Sciences Standing Committee on Women has sent Summers a
sharp letter of censure; alumnae are threatening to suspend donations;
students are mobilized and Summers has been barraged by protests from
distraught Harvard co-eds who say they feel betrayed and diminished by his
words. Thea Daniels, a 21-year-old sociology major, told the New York Times,
"It's disconcerting that the man who is supposed to have your best interest
in mind and is the leader of your education community thinks less of us".
More than 100 of the 600 professors in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and
Sciences have signed the letter of reprimand sent by the Standing Committee
on Women.

Transcripts of Summers s talk are unavailable; but, by most accounts, his
comments were little more than a review of some well-known and
scientifically reputable explanations for the paucity of women in top
academic positions in math and science. He mentioned discrimination as one
likely factor. But he also noted that, cross-culturally, more men than women
score at the very top in math aptitude tests; and he referred to the
literature on innate male/female differences in abilities and preferences.
Men appear to have an inborn advantage when it comes to spatial-reasoning
skills. They are more adept at rotating three-dimensional geometric figures
in their minds and they perform better on spatial-manipulation tests. Of
course, any number of women have exceptional abilities in spatial reasoning;
we are talking only about averages. Nothing Summers said was a threat to the
advancement of a single woman in any of the sciences. The statistical fact
that more men tend to score in the top 5 percent makes no predictions about
the abilities of any particular man or woman.

Women, on the other hand, tend to have better verbal skills. It has long
been known that girls begin talking earlier and that speech and reading
disorders such as dyslexia are more common in men. On most national
assessment tests, women are well ahead of men in reading and writing. Is it
really so heretical to entertain the hypothesis that there may be forces
other than sexism at work that explain why there are more women majoring in
English literature and more men in electrical engineering?

There are several other differences in which genes appear to be implicated:
Men are greater risk-takers, women are more nurturing. Boys like action,
competitive roughhousing, and inanimate objects, and they are far less
likely than girls to talk about their feelings. The male tendency to be
competitive, risk-loving, more narrowly focused, and less concerned with
feelings has consequences in the real world. It could explain why there are
more men at the extremes of success and failure: more male CEOs, more males
in maximum-security prisons.

If differences in male and female proclivities and preferences were purely
the effects of socialization, one would expect to find some societies in
which the traits were reversed. But the entire anthropological record offers
not a single notable example of a society in which women have better
spatial-reasoning skills and men the better verbal skills; in which females
are fixated on objects and how to manipulate them and men on feelings and
sensibilities.

Summers' mistake was to think he could talk freely about gender issues on
which campus ideologues have staked out very definite positions. He had been
assured that the talk was merely for provoking discussion and that it was to
be off the record. But by entertaining the hypothesis of innateness, before
an audience with a fair number of gender-is-a-social-construction
dogmatists, he left himself vulnerable to a feminist attack. Now he has been
forced to recant and atone. He has apologized not once but three times. I
was wrong to have spoken in a way that has resulted in an unintended signal
of discouragement to talented girls and women. Harvard professor Ruth Wisse
has compared him to a prisoner in a Soviet show trial.

But of course Lawrence Summers is not a prisoner in a closed society. He is
a powerful, intelligent man in an important leadership position, with a
well-deserved reputation for being independent and courageous. It is in fact
quite uncharacteristic for him to behave as he has. That he feels
constrained to do so attests to the inordinate political power of the gender
warriors on American campuses.

Instead of apologizing, Summers should have considered sending the Harvard
Faculty Standing Committee on Women copies of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty,
with the suggestion that they read it carefully and take its teachings on
open discussion to heart. As for those in his audience who style themselves
the country s most accomplished scholars on women's issues, he should refer
them to some elementary texts on the canons of scientific evidence.

Some Harvard faculty members have come to Summers' defense. The
linguist/psychologist Steven Pinker told the Harvard Crimson that anyone who
would rush out of a room at the mention of an idea or who declares certain
ideas taboo without giving argument doesn t get the concept of a university.
By contrast, Howard Gardner, a professor in the Harvard Graduate School of
Education, seems completely resigned to playing by the censors rules. While
acknowledging to the Crimson that Summers was within the pale of legitimate
scientific discourse, he said, If he wanted to make these remarks publicly,
it would pay him to run them by some colleagues including people like me to
reduce the chance that he would be misunderstood. I would have advised him
to have spoken from a written text. One hopes that Harvard has more Pinkers
than Gardners. But the truth is that academics are not known for their
intellectual courage. They tend to run for cover leaving freedom of
discussion to fend for itself.

Former astronaut and professor of space science Sally Ride co-signed a
letter to the New York Times (with 99 other academics and scientists)
asserting that Summers' remarks had created a teachable moment for greater
public awareness of the need to advance women in science. It is, indeed, a
teachable moment but not about how to get more women onto the science
faculties. It's an occasion to learn the sobering lesson about the low
estate of intellectual freedom in the American academy today.




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