Larry Summers in Winter

A report on the Larry Summers affair appears in the latest newsletter from the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship.

You may recall, Larry Summers, former US Secretary of Commerce and current President of Harvard, got into hot water by suggesting factors other than discrimination may account for the shortage or female professors in the hard sciences.

According to the report, from one who heard the speech, Summers discussed two possible reasons, other than sex discrimination, for the disproportion here:

First, that women may more often avoid “high-powered” jobs that require long hours and total dedication to career.

Which of course they do.

Second, that there are more men than women who are extremely adept at math, physics, or chemistry.

This is empirically so; at more than 3.5 or 4 standard deviations above the mean, in standard tests on these subjects, men outnumber women 5 to 1. It should follow, on this factor alone, that men should outnumber women 5 to 1 on science faculties, if there is no discrimination at that level.

Feminists, of course, are now the first to insist there are real differences between men and women. Women are more “nurturing,” and so forth. But even if this were not so, even if this were all caused by social expectations or discrimination against younger women, it is still impossible to correct it at the level of university faculty hiring. You necessarily have a much smaller pool of highly-qualified female candidates from which to choose.

But, of course, all hell broke loose. Summers was obliged to apologize repeatedly, reputedly almost lost his job, and was obliged to announce $50 million in new funding to get more women into such jobs.

“The good academic value,” Summers said, “of challenging and provoking thought just went where it should not have gone.”

I guess that says it all.

Some things we are not allowed to even think.