RALEIGH – If you haven’t already heard about it, you might want to read up on the absurd controversy underway for some weeks now up at Harvard University. Its president, former Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, is under assault from feminist groups for comments he made during a presentation to some professors about the issue of continuing disparities in academia.
Among the potential explanations – but by no means the only way or the most important one – why women and men might not be distributed evenly across all professions and disciplines, Summers suggested, is that women and men might not have exactly the same interests or aptitudes in various fields of endeavor.
For this rather-banal suggestion, Summers was, and continues to be, excoriated. One of the most interesting reactions came from an MIT biology professor, Nancy Hopkins . “I felt I was going to be sick,” she said, and walked out during Summers’ remarks. “My heart was pounding and my breath was shallow,” she added. “I was extremely upset.”
As Ruth Marcus wrote later in The Washington Post, the resulting furor has a far different meaning to many outside observers than it does to denizens of the academy. “[I]t says less, in the end, about the Harvard president,” she wrote, “than it does about the unwillingness of the modern academy to tolerate the kind of freewheeling inquiry that academics and intellectuals above all ought to prize rather than revile.” Indeed, one need not believe that Summers’ proposition is true, or likely to be true if testable with available data, to believe that its espousal does not equate to male chauvinism.
It’s important to remember that women have seen a tremendous expansion of educational and economic opportunity during the past three decades, as economists Michael Cox and Richard Alm observed in a recent essay. It is preposterous to suggest that institutions such as Harvard are still run by a bunch of chauvinists and bigots, who (perhaps unknowingly) continue to engage in rampant and systematic exclusion of women and minorities from positions of accomplishments and authority.
Instead, modern academia is a place where, in the name of academic freedom, faculty members demand that a private donor silence one of its other recipient organizations. It is a place where, in the name of diversity and integration, race- and sex-specific organizations, disciplines, and dormitories are encouraged. And it is a place where, hearing something she perceives as unfairly stereotyping women, a female professor exits the room in near-hysterics – and then relates the story without seeming even to recognize the irony.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal Online