http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/sommers200503220754.asp

March 22, 2005, 7:54 a.m.
Who Stole Harvard?
Big Sisters and Larry Summers.

By Christina Hoff Sommers

The Harvard faculty of arts and science just last week passed a motion
expressing a lack of confidence in the leadership of President Lawrence
Summers. Such censure is unprecedented in Harvard's near 400-year-history.
Summers unwittingly stepped on the third rail of university politics when 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.
To understand the hornets' nest Summers has stirred up, one needs to have a
close look at the main hornets.


To an outsider, the controversy must look very strange. Nothing Summers said
was a threat to the advancement of a single competent woman in any of the
sciences. The statistical fact that more men tend to score in the top-five
percent of math-aptitude tests makes no predictions whatsoever about the
abilities of any particular man or woman. Far from being outrageous or
sexist, Summers's comments were completely respectable and altogether
mainstream. But not in the academy. As one outraged Harvard feminist
professor of ethics, Mahzarin Banaji, told the Harvard Crimson, "In this day
and age to believe that men and women differ in their basic competence for
math and science is as insidious as believing that some people are better
suited to be slaves than masters."

The January 14 conference where 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. The press has widely reported on the overreaction
Nancy Hopkins, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology biologist and
feminist activist who says she almost became physically ill. What many press

stories fail to mention is that this is not the first time Professor Hopkins
had been offended by perceived sexism.

In the late 1990s, she accused MIT of bias against herself and several of
her female colleagues. Instead of bringing in objective outsiders to
evaluate her complaints, MIT put Hopkins herself in charge of investigating
her own charges. She spearheaded a gender-bias study that concluded -
surprise, surprise - that there was insidious bias against women at MIT. The
study proved to be a travesty. It was altogether unscientific. Hopkins and
her co-investigators did not produce any hard data. Most of the "evidence"
came in the form of anecdotes about hurt feelings and perceptions of
invisibility and discomfort. One critic aptly described the study as part of
the dubious legacy of postmodernism: "evidence-free, feelings-based
research." In 1999, The Chronicle of Higher Education called Professor
Hopkins the "poster child for gender bias," and said that that she had done
for sex discrimination what Anita Hill did for sexual harassment. MIT met
all of her demands; she was invited to speak on campuses around the country;
the Ford Foundation donated a million dollars to her cause, and she was
treated like a heroine by the Clinton White House.

Soon after Summers uttered his fateful speculations, the New York Times ran
a front-page story that purported to be an objective survey of the latest
scholarship on sex differences. Except that the lead reporter, Natalie
Angier, is anything but objective. In 1999, she published a book entitled
Woman: An Intimate Geography. That book is a manifesto for the "gender is a
social construction" school of feminism. Gloria Steinem was completely blown
away by it and called it "liberation biology." An excited
reviewer from Elle
magazine said of Angier's book "If Our Bodies, Ourselves has become the
bible of women's bodies, let Woman: an Intimate Geography be our
Shakespeare." Never mind the hundreds, if not thousands, of serious
researchers - geneticists, endocrinologists, neuroscientists, developmental
psychologists - who disagree with Angier and who provide compelling evidence
for many innate differences and against the social construction thesis.
Though she mentions one such critic in passing, readers of Angier's article
in the New York Times are given no hint of the power and extent of the
research on biological differences that affect aptitudes and preferences.
Quite the contrary, Angier made it look as if Summers was way out on a limb
even to have entertained his tentative speculations about biologically-based
difference.

Angier and her sisters-in-arms, recognize only one explanation for why there
are fewer women than men teaching math and physics at Harvard or MIT: sexist
bias. That there are more male than female math prodigies; that women, as a
group, are less obsessively focused on careers and more likely than men to
find fulfillment in taking care of children, is not an acceptable
explanation.

For her article, Angier interviewed Yale astrophysicist Megan Urry. Times
readers were not informed that Urry is even more hard-line than Angier
herself on the topic of gender bias - if that is possible. In the 90s, Urry
was part of a feminist campaign to rename the Big Bang Theory. As she told a
CNN interviewer, "A lot of the style is very macho, and that can be
off-putting to young women, and 'big bang' is just another little grain of
sand in that big sandbox."

What is she talking about and what sandbox? And what kind of young woman
with a serious interest in science would be put off by a graphic description
of a momentous cosmic event - only someone like Professor Urry carrying a
gender bias chip on her shoulder.

A week or so after she was quoted in the Angier article, Urry entered the
fray with her own attack article on Summers in the Washington Post. She sees
bias and sexism in the choice made by many women to leave science and stay
home with children. She does not regard such choices as freely made: "What
troubles me is that I rarely saw men making...the choice to stay home with
kids." It simply never occurs to her that men and women might actually be
wired differently when it comes to preferences for a domestic life style.

In her allegedly objective article on the state of gender research, Angier
cites not only the authority of Urry, but also the views of Virginia Valian,
a psychologist at Hunter College. Who is Virginia Valian? In 1998, she wrote
a book for MIT press called Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women. Of
course, she assumes that women's progress has been slow. For feminists like
Valian, good news is no news. For Valian as for Urry, sexist bias and sexist
socialization are the only acceptable explanations for the different career
choices men and women make. One passage tells you all you need to know about
her mindset. She asks readers to share her horror at the injustice that
women perennially suffer:

  If she lies in bed while the baby cries, telling her husband that it is
his turn to get up, she is perceived as cold and unfeeling. Even though it
is his turn and he should know that without being told - he should be
subliminally listening for the baby's cry and leap out of bed the moment he
hears it - he is not a monster - either to himself or to the baby's mother -
if he does none of those things but mumbles that he is too tired. From the
perspective of fairness, none of this makes sense.

Well, from the perspective of common sense and human nature, it makes
perfect sense. And what is her remedy for this pervasive, endemic and
age-old injustice that even women reinforce? She wants all children to be
socialized to androgyny. "Egalitarian parents can bring up their children so
that both boys and girls play with dolls and trucks."

As I said, Natalie Angier cited the expertise of both Urry and Valian in her
Times article. And, just as had happened with Megan Urry, Valian was invited
to write her own article for the Washington Post.

Think of these women: Nancy Hopkins, Natalie Angier, Megan Urry, and
Virginia Valian. It is rare to meet such people in everyday life - but the
academy is their natural habitat and there you find them in dismayingly
large and indignant numbers. A few Harvard women have come to Summers's
defense: the literary scholar, Ruth Wisse, the economist Claudia Goldin. But
few women and even fewer men stand up to the hard-liners in the academy, who
are ever eager to show that "men just don't get it." Some male faculty have
openly supported Summers (most notably, Steven Pinker and Stephan
Thernstrom) but it appears that most have run for cover, or joined the pack
of Summers's tormenters.

The Harvard faculty is in very bad shape right now. Summers could be forced
out and replaced by a right-thinking woman. The forces of resentment have
the power to do that. But, what they do not have is the power to repeal the
laws of nature. Mother Nature does not play by the rules of political
correctness. And not even Harvard can flourish when intellectual freedom is
forced to play by twisted feminist rules.

And speaking of play, boys are not going to play with dolls: They will
continue to resist all and every efforts to resocialize them in accordance
with specifications worked out by Virginia Valian and her sister ideologues.
Women too are going to continue to disappoint Big Sister for they will
remain attached to their children and homes in special ways deplored by
Summers's accusers.

Of course, offending feminist professors was not Summers's only crime. He is
outspoken, direct, and does not suffer fools gladly. Not only did he violate
the holy dogma of social constructionism, he regularly violates a sacred
commandment of modern education: Thou shalt be sensitive, nurturing, and
protective of everyone's self-esteem. Such "virtues" now count for more in
an academic leader than integrity, intellectual vision, or a commitment to
free inquiry and free expression. If Summers goes down at Harvard, it will
seriously damage the standards and traditions of American higher education.




--
Men are everywhere that matters!





--- UseNet To RIME Gateway {at} 3/23/05 4:02:05 AM ---