Reeducation at Harvard
Lawrence Summers, the President of Harvard, has been pilloried for his rather innocuous comments at a conference to the effect that the reason that there may be more male than female mathematics, physics and other hard science professors at high-end research institutions may have something to do with innate differences between the sexes. The New York Times article from today is Orwellian in its calls for Summers to go through sensitivity retraining so that he "gets his mind right." Summers, for his part, and somewhat shamefully, appears perfectly willing to eat as much crow as he has to in order to maintain his position. The whole episode is a sad commentary on just how far away from "free" the expression of ideas is on elite campuses. As someone who attended Princeton and Duke and has followed academic politics for more than two decades, this is par for the course.
But let's consider how confusing this must be to actual consumers of the educational product Harvard sells, the undergraduates who come from all over the world and pay $40,000 a year for a Harvard diploma. How many times do you think terms or phrases like "openness," "diversity," "celebrate difference," "open mind," "free inquiry," "challenge assumptions," etc. are used in the first week you arrive on campus as a freshman? But now the very professoriate that preaches being open to "new ideas" crucifies its own President for having the temerity to say what any casual honest observer of actual human beings (or even non-casual, scientific observers) must admit. What gives?
Hmmmm.... the freshman thinks. There are, in fact, innate physical differences between men and women. Everybody knows this, at least on some level. That's why male athletes at the margins perform at higher levels than female athletes. It's not a big difference -- Amanda Beard of Duke's women's basketball team is bigger, stronger, quicker and better than 98% of the boys on Duke's campus. She can play one-one-one and be competitive against the very best of the remaining 1.9% of boys who constitute the elite of Duke's campus intramural teams. She might even be able to be competitive in a game against walk-ons from Duke's men's team, high school basketball players and even stars who weren't good enough to receive a scholarship from a college like Duke. But there is no way she can compete at the margin against Duke's scholarship athletes who are recruited from all over the because they are among the top 10 or 20 or 50 high school basketball players in the whole country. The same thing is true in other sports. Marion Jones can beat me and 99.9% of men in the 100 meters. She can't beat a world-class male sprinter, can't beat a NCAA-level male sprinter, and probably would lose to a significant number of state-championship level high school male sprinters. She's great, but at the margins, where only the elite go, she can't compete because of innate physical differences between the sexes.
There are also at least some cognitive differences between men and women. Everybody knows this too. But, strangely, the freshman thinks, we're only allowed to talk about it when they are negative about men. Again, what gives? Innate differences between men and women's brains are why men tend to be more violent. That's why men tend to have more schizophrenia and depression. That's why men tend to have more anger-management issues. That's why men tend more often to be loners. That's why boys tend more often to have ADD. At least that's what my psychology teachers says. And, if there weren't innate brain chemistry differences, why is there a differential in the level of drugs our medical community prescribes to men and women for these types of maladies? Heck, half the boys in middle school were on freakin' Ritalin! If there were no differences, the level of prescriptions would be the same, wouldn't it? But it's not. Again, at the margins -- in this case in the relatively small part of the bell curve where people have serious mental problems -- men are different than women. Aren't they?
So.... there is no reasonable, plausible, logical reason why these types of differences couldn't translate into different outcomes in terms of the ability of men and women at the margin to achieve success in high-level, high-powered sciences. I'm not saying that there necessarily is such a connection. I'm just saying that there could be. Again, I must stress that we're talking about the margins, where only the elite of the elite succeed. For us garden-variety folk, there are, of course, many many women who are highly trained and qualified mathematicians, engineers, physicists, and scientists of all stripes, and one would be a fool to judge a book by its cover. But at the Harvards of the world, where the most cutting-edge, difficult science and math is undertaken, the marginal male may have innate advantages over the marginal female. This is not to say that gender should form a basis for deciding whom to hire -- Harvard obviously shouldn't say that they aren't going to hire a female physics professors simply because she's female. But why can't the differences be honestly used as an explanation -- tentative, hypothetical, subject to refutation by experiment or other data-gathering over time -- after the fact for why there end up being more men? Isn't that all that Summers did? Isn't that what universities are supposed to do? Gather facts? Test hypotheses? Move us toward a truer picture of why things are? Provide reasonable explanations for what otherwise can only be viewed as a "conspiracy so vast"? Or else disprove proffered hypotheses with newer, better data and newer, better reasoning?
Anyway, that's what I thought universities were supposed to do. Apparently it isn't true at Harvard anymore, at least not with regard to this one taboo issue. Now, we shoot the messenger. Now, we shout down the voices that challenge our preconceptions.
But let's consider how confusing this must be to actual consumers of the educational product Harvard sells, the undergraduates who come from all over the world and pay $40,000 a year for a Harvard diploma. How many times do you think terms or phrases like "openness," "diversity," "celebrate difference," "open mind," "free inquiry," "challenge assumptions," etc. are used in the first week you arrive on campus as a freshman? But now the very professoriate that preaches being open to "new ideas" crucifies its own President for having the temerity to say what any casual honest observer of actual human beings (or even non-casual, scientific observers) must admit. What gives?
Hmmmm.... the freshman thinks. There are, in fact, innate physical differences between men and women. Everybody knows this, at least on some level. That's why male athletes at the margins perform at higher levels than female athletes. It's not a big difference -- Amanda Beard of Duke's women's basketball team is bigger, stronger, quicker and better than 98% of the boys on Duke's campus. She can play one-one-one and be competitive against the very best of the remaining 1.9% of boys who constitute the elite of Duke's campus intramural teams. She might even be able to be competitive in a game against walk-ons from Duke's men's team, high school basketball players and even stars who weren't good enough to receive a scholarship from a college like Duke. But there is no way she can compete at the margin against Duke's scholarship athletes who are recruited from all over the because they are among the top 10 or 20 or 50 high school basketball players in the whole country. The same thing is true in other sports. Marion Jones can beat me and 99.9% of men in the 100 meters. She can't beat a world-class male sprinter, can't beat a NCAA-level male sprinter, and probably would lose to a significant number of state-championship level high school male sprinters. She's great, but at the margins, where only the elite go, she can't compete because of innate physical differences between the sexes.
There are also at least some cognitive differences between men and women. Everybody knows this too. But, strangely, the freshman thinks, we're only allowed to talk about it when they are negative about men. Again, what gives? Innate differences between men and women's brains are why men tend to be more violent. That's why men tend to have more schizophrenia and depression. That's why men tend to have more anger-management issues. That's why men tend more often to be loners. That's why boys tend more often to have ADD. At least that's what my psychology teachers says. And, if there weren't innate brain chemistry differences, why is there a differential in the level of drugs our medical community prescribes to men and women for these types of maladies? Heck, half the boys in middle school were on freakin' Ritalin! If there were no differences, the level of prescriptions would be the same, wouldn't it? But it's not. Again, at the margins -- in this case in the relatively small part of the bell curve where people have serious mental problems -- men are different than women. Aren't they?
So.... there is no reasonable, plausible, logical reason why these types of differences couldn't translate into different outcomes in terms of the ability of men and women at the margin to achieve success in high-level, high-powered sciences. I'm not saying that there necessarily is such a connection. I'm just saying that there could be. Again, I must stress that we're talking about the margins, where only the elite of the elite succeed. For us garden-variety folk, there are, of course, many many women who are highly trained and qualified mathematicians, engineers, physicists, and scientists of all stripes, and one would be a fool to judge a book by its cover. But at the Harvards of the world, where the most cutting-edge, difficult science and math is undertaken, the marginal male may have innate advantages over the marginal female. This is not to say that gender should form a basis for deciding whom to hire -- Harvard obviously shouldn't say that they aren't going to hire a female physics professors simply because she's female. But why can't the differences be honestly used as an explanation -- tentative, hypothetical, subject to refutation by experiment or other data-gathering over time -- after the fact for why there end up being more men? Isn't that all that Summers did? Isn't that what universities are supposed to do? Gather facts? Test hypotheses? Move us toward a truer picture of why things are? Provide reasonable explanations for what otherwise can only be viewed as a "conspiracy so vast"? Or else disprove proffered hypotheses with newer, better data and newer, better reasoning?
Anyway, that's what I thought universities were supposed to do. Apparently it isn't true at Harvard anymore, at least not with regard to this one taboo issue. Now, we shoot the messenger. Now, we shout down the voices that challenge our preconceptions.
posted by PDB at 8:20 AM
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