We should perhaps be grateful that Kingsley Amis is not around to write a novel about the current president of Harvard, Larry Summers. But “Larry and the Women” would be a great read — along with “Larry and the African-Americans” or even “Larry and the Gays”.
Most provocateurs tend toward the dense. Summers is one of the sharpest minds of his generation. When he speaks, it’s hard to ignore him. In Washington, where he worked as an economics adviser to the Clinton administration, he left politicians and bureaucrats agape with his energy and arrogance.
Then, in some stroke of unusual brilliance, he was appointed president of Harvard. One of his first moves was pointedly to ask Cornel West, the African-American scholar, when he was going to produce a new, solid body of work. West quit in outrage. Then Summers backed allowing military recruiters on campus, despite a boycott because of their ban on gays. Some of the faculty have been regretting Summers’s appointment ever since.
They should get over it. Summers is the best thing to happen to American higher education in a very long time. The latest flap reveals why. Summers was speaking in a private capacity at a seminar that was supposed to be off the record. He had no text and spoke from notes. His topic was why women are not equally represented at the very top of the sciences in the American academy.
Women make up 35% of the faculty in US higher education (and a majority of students). But they make up only 20% of top positions in science. Summers prefaced his remarks by saying they were designed to provoke. He spoke of the fact that some women might prefer to spend critical research years bringing up children.
Then he made the mistake of pointing to some interesting research by the University of Michigan sociologist Yu Xie and his University of California-Davis colleague Kimberlee A Shauman. Their hypothesis was that in science tests the median score for men and women was roughly the same. But for some reason men were disproportionately represented at the very bottom and the very top of the table.
Or, as the Harvard Crimson reported: “There are more men who are at the top and more men who are utter failures.”
One possible explanation for this is genetics. Summers raised the possibility that this might have something to do with male preponderance at the very top of research science. And he immediately added: “I’d like to be proven wrong on this one.”
This was too much for one of the attendees, Professor Nancy Hopkins. “When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn’t breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill,” Hopkins told a sympathetic New York Times. “Let’s not forget that people used to say that women couldn’t drive an automobile.”
Okay, let’s not forget that. But, honestly, what does it say that a leading academic finds the mere positing of an empirical theory of a complex problem something that makes her “physically ill”? And to leap immediately from Summers’s subtle question to the crudest accusations of sexism is a form of emotional blackmail. It’s a sublime example of the left-liberal academy’s preference for feeling over argument.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s brilliant scientist Steven Pinker put it better than I can: “Look, the truth cannot be offensive. Perhaps the hypothesis is wrong, but how would we ever find out whether it is wrong if it is ‘offensive’ even to consider it? People who storm out of a meeting at the mention of a hypothesis, or declare it taboo or offensive without providing arguments or evidence, don’t get the concept of a university or free inquiry.”
Is Summers’s supposition outrageous? Hardly. Scientists are finding out more and more about the differences between the male and female brains. One thing that endures across cultures and populations is a male edge at the very top of the bell curve for spatial and mathematical reasoning. Ever wonder why boys are more likely to suffer from autism? Some researchers are investigating whether autism isn’t an extreme case of this specialisation.
Scientists have also discovered correlations between certain behavioural traits and levels of testosterone. Testosterone exists in both men and women but it is far more plentiful in men. Among testosterone-related characteristics are aggression, lack of focus and edginess.
No big surprise then that 95% of all hyperactive kids are boys; or that four times as many boys are dyslexic and learning-disabled as girls. There is a greater distinction between the right and left brains among boys than girls, and worse linguistic skills. These are generalisations, of course. There are many boys who are great linguists and model students, and vice versa. Some boys even prefer, when left to their own devices, to play with dolls as well as trucks. But we are talking of generalities.
All this is the subject of cutting-edge scientific debate. It cannot be illegitimate to conduct it. In a university it shouldn’t be illegitimate to have any debate that is rooted in evidence, reason and argument. That’s what universities are for.
Of course, discussion of human natural inequality will always be sensitive. It’s a hard fact to absorb that some people will never be as intelligent as some others, or as musically gifted, or as mathematically skilled. Americans in particular hate the notion that there is some natural limit on what people can and cannot achieve.
But there is a distinction between moral and political equality for all — the bedrock of a liberal society — and unavoidable natural inequalities between human beings and, in a few narrow areas, between social groups. This cannot and should not mean that any individual should be prejudged or denied opportunity. But it does mean that some imbalances in certain professions may not be entirely a function of prejudice or bigotry.
Summers would be in a stronger position if Harvard didn’t have a much worse record in hiring women professors than some other universities. There were 32 tenured members of faculty hired last year at Harvard, of which only four were women. He’d also be better off if he had silky social skills. But by raising interesting questions Summers is leading by example. True scholars are afraid of no hypothesis; they go where others fear to think.
For all the offence he has created, Summers has revealed one important fact: the truth sometimes is controversial. And if you aren’t sometimes challenged and appalled by some ideas, you haven’t really begun to grapple with them.
