At Harvard University, President Lawrence Summers spoke at a closed-door seminar in which he gave his idea's about genetics and gender, and he is being treated by mob rule instead of being afforded the academic freedom he is entitled. He spoke about women in the sciences and why they are "underrepresented." He also said that, "Catholics are substantially underrepresented in the investment banking.... and Jews are very substantially underrepresented in farming and agriculture." But he offered a "Why?" for women.
Summers faces intensifying demands for his resignation because he dared give his explanation (He did allow for the fact that he might be wrong) for why there are insufficient numbers of women in Harvard's science departments who hold tenure. He suggested that perhaps part of the explanation might be genetically based and these remarks were interpreted as being sexist by various female professors, who started yelling in Bill O'Reilly fashion -- "Shut up!"
I find it interesting that most of us want free speech for ourselves while many are willing to deny it to others. But I'm appalled (as a professor) that the same female professors who demand their right to academic freedom to teach and research are willing to deny it to the president of their university simply because they disagree with him. And, in addition, they demand that he be punished! He's in the position of trying to herd cats. This is unfortunate at the very time that academic freedom is under attack by the Republican right across America.
Men and woman have some genetically based physical differences. Was Summers out of line to suggest that genetics might be the reason for the fact that more men than women achieve the highest scores on mathematics aptitude tests? That nature (genetics) sets limits to the malleability of human material? No, but he did not exercise political smarts by giving those women present that answer.
For liberation is an Enlightenment idea (Jean Jocques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke), a predominately male (if not masculinist) notion of abstract, universal freedom, in which women embrace it at their peril. This is why the New Feminism in the 1980s lumped Marxism with the Enlightenment, so discrediting both. But Hobbes was partially right. We live in a world of scarcity, which is as much a consequence of our boundless wants, hopes and ambitions as it is of physical limitation. Though we may never "invade and destroy" our neighbors (beware! Elmer Gonty is sermoniging once again in America), there are some good things we can only have if he or she has not. We can ascribe this tragic feature of the human condition to the Fall of Adam in the Garden, to William of Occam, or we can put all the blame on Eve. Regardless, the market economy, like every other social order knowable to man or women, liberates some of us in some ways and enslaves some of us in other ways. But we know that some freedoms will be mutually exclusive; hence that political wisdom will lie in trading off those freedoms we value lightly in exchange for those we value more.
Now we have arrived at a prime truth: Harvard's female professors can play a "man's game" ("Universities like ours," Summers apologized, "were originally designed by men and for men") or they can take this opportunity to reshape Harvard's current system to meet their needs, with Summers blowing their trumpet.
Woman were degraded by American law for most of our history. But our largely Lockean Constitution surely created the framework by which all individuals would eventually be liberated from the unessential baggage of race, class, religion and gender.
My oldest granddaughter wants to attend Harvard, and I want Harvard to stop the apparent practice of sacrificing the she's for the he's in tenure decisions in the sciences. Whatever, fences that are mended are still fences.
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