Drums along the Charles River
Stanley Kurtz as the National Review describes the resignation of Lawrence Summers as the consequence of a clash within the Democratic Party. "These moderate Democrats want to bring the academy closer to the center of the country. But when push came to shove, the leftist faculty wouldn't play along." Summers was apparently offered a role in the next Democratic campaign, which suggests that he had to accede to the radicals or forfeit any chance of being a "bridge" figure in the campaign.
Alan Dershowitz meanwhile, dwells on the sheer underhandedness and illegitimacy of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences "coup de etat". Whatever the Graduate Schools thought of Summers, they are anxious to preserve their independence within the academic world, and the FAS action was akin to one party grabbing victuals from the table instead of waiting to be served by the waiter.
"The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which forced Summers's resignation by voting a lack of confidence in him last March and threatening to do so again on Feb. 28, is only one component of Harvard University and is hardly representative of widespread attitudes on the campus toward Summers. The graduate faculties, the students, and the alumni generally supported Summers for his many accomplishments. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences includes, in general, some of the most radical, hard-left elements within Harvard's diverse constituencies. And let there be no mistake about the origin of Summers's problem with that particular faculty: It started as a hard left-center conflict. Summers committed the cardinal sin against the academic hard left: He expressed politically incorrect views regarding gender, race, religion, sexual preference, and the military."
Commentary
If Kurtz is right, Summers decamped because he had his eye on managing a future Democratic campaign. But the manner of his departure may have stirred up a hornet's nest at Harvard. It will be interesting to see whether the other members of the Harvard community will let such a challenge to their prerogatives pass unnoticed or make a fight of it, not perhaps from principle, but out of a need to retain their traditional independence.
posted by wretchardthecat at 2/22/2006 12:04:00 PM
17 Comments:
Fear societies, heavy and lite, rule by intimidation. Summers chose appeasement and paid with his honor.
It is sad to see when politics get so involved with academics. Unfortunately, this is not the first time I've experienced the backlash from a far-left liberal co-worker who could not let their conscience stand someone else expressing disagreement with their absolutely correct views.
As they say amongst the rank & file - be careful what you wish for.
With Summers exit it is unlikely Harvard will find a replacement of his caliber whom those involved in the coup will tolerate.
Dershowitz say prof that engineered the coup is on record on a TV Show saying Summers was telling them to be more patriotic.
Very Uncool.
Also too friendly to Joos at the expense of the Palis.
Also says Dershowitz is unfit to teach.
Probably has an IQ 1/3 that of Dershowitz.
"says"
Who cares?
I actually care. Harvard has been an institution of higher education since 1636. It is the sort of intellectual headwaters of our country--when you go there, you are at home in the American academic tradition as you are in few other places. Harvard means a lot to the United States and the English-speaking world. Certainly the lefties know that--that is why their attacks are so fierce, their defense so dogged, when it comes to that turf. You can't simply start up an alternative Harvard; it wouldn't be the same.
In a way Harvard never recovered from the protests of 1969 and the takeover of University Hall, the administation headquarters in Harvard Yard. The students are not squatting in the president's office anymore, smoking his cigars--they don't have to in order to have their demands register. Now they and their ilk, bending a finger, have the power to demand that the president leave.
And leave he does!
Voltimand said: "L'affaire Summers began when a feminist faculty member pulled a typical academic feminist move, by posturing in poses of outrage and even physical debility when Summers speculated about female brain power re: the sciences."
True that. It is worth noting, however, that the faculty member in question was from MIT, not Harvard. Her name is nancy Hopkins and she teaches biology. There was more at work than just feminism, I might add. Nancy is a natural scientist, not a social scientist. This distinction is not unimportant.
I was on the faculty at MIT when the L'Affaire Summmers happened. While I have attended and presented at research seminars at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) I did not attend the symposium in question where Summers' most infamous remarks were made. See below. (I think my invitation to that one got lost in campus mail ;-).
And of course, I wasn't the only one in Cambridge who didn't attend. Thing is, you wouldn't have known this for all the people at Harvard, MIT, and elsewhere who KNEW what the man said. They thought they knew the words he spoke and what he meant when he spoke them. In actuality, many did not.
I think Prof Hopkins a big part of the reason was disgusted because just didn't grasp that there are empirical ways to test the hypotheses that Summers proposed. And given that Summers was arguably the most accomplished economist of his generation (if memory serves me correctly he got tenured at Harvard at age 28, directly out of grad school. That's equivalent of going pro straight out of high school and then getting league MVP in your rookie year).
Here's a quote of his remarks from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Summers
"So my best guess, to provoke you, of what's behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people's legitimate family desires and employers' current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination. I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong."
Nancy, smart woman that she undoubtedly is, thought that she didn't have to provide an evidence. For her and others like her, she is the only evidence needed. She's a woman and capable. In her line of work, one compelling counter-factual piece of evidence is often sufficient to disprove a theory or hypothesis.
Not so in the social sciences. Here,
theories never explain all of the variation. There is no single factor
which completely explains why something happens or changes.
Hypotheses have data which supports and refutes them and the preponderance of the evidence. Control variables along with hypothesized factors of interest are both taken explicitly into account.
As Wretchard pointed out regarding climate models, social phenomenon are complex. Several variables can be a work at one time. They may interact with one another and their effects may be non-linear or time delayed.
No one on earth is better than economists and sociologists than untangling these complex empirical questions. Their methodologies are superb, though by no means perfect. They are not, however, common to all scientific fields.
And, quite frankly, no one understands less about these methods than natural scientists. They are simply not instructed in them because they don't tend to need them. Almost no one in the humanities knows of these methods. Again, they don't need them in their work.
Consequently, many of them realize that being a social animal does not qualify one as a social scientist anymore than being a mammal qualifies one as a biologist.
What Nancy didn't see was that there was an empirical question, several really, implied in Summers words. Actually, there was an entire research agenda in them. Any competent social scientist could have recognized that. When he said he wanted to be proved wrong, he meant empirically, not politically correctly!
Nancy and the Harvard FAS have now seen to it that this research will not be carried out, at least not at Harvard. They have also ensured that anyone who does will be declared another type of biological specimen- a Neanderthal.
PS: I might have been able to explain all this to Nancy as we drove or took the Red Line back to MIT... if only my invitation hadn't been lost in campus mail.
I should have said:
"A big part of why Prof Hopkins was disgusted was because she just didn't grasp that there are empirical ways to test the hypotheses that Summers proposed."
arggh. it keeps sending before I'm ready...
"A big part of why Prof Hopkins was disgusted was because she just didn't grasp that there are empirical ways to test the hypotheses that Summers proposed." And given that Summers was arguably the most accomplished economist of his generation...it's not hard to see why.
For some reason I am having trouble with the "edit comment" function. Rather than continue to struggle with it, I have chosen to put my comments here, in a post entitled Miss Understanding Larry Summers
Voltimand:
While I don't know exactly how you define the term, I'll accept your characterization that Nancy was acting like a "feminist."
My contention is that there was another powerful dynamic at play besides feminism- the social science vs. natural science understandings of the world: Hence the title of my post: Miss Understanding, i.e. feminism and world views.
In my opinion social phenomena are complex and, as such, are always explained by more than one factor. That said, I'm happy to concede that feminism was the strongest of the two proposed explanations.
This then brings another question to the forefront. Since Harvard FAS faculty are not all women, or even a majority of women, how then do we explain the reaction of the large majority of male faculty who also voted to no-confidence in Summers?
Are they not "real" men? Are they just spineless nancy-boys who are browbeaten and cowed by their females colleagues? Are the male faculty of Harvard FAS "feminists"? Is that even possible? Are they worried that their girlfriends would drop them or that their wives would reacquaint them with the living room sofa? (I ask this last question fully aware that these two groupings are not mutually exclusive. Surely there was at least one male FAS prof who had both a girlfriend and a wife). But seriously, how do we explain the men's behavior if not by differences in world views?
Finally, I can't say that I necessarily share your view of women in academia. My experiences have been uniformly positive, despite differences of opinion about many issues. Maybe it's my aftershave?
I agree that Prof Hopkins and others like her want the status quo maintained and are not anxious to see it overturned. I further agree with your statment about leverage that "under-representation" brings. And I think we both agree that the likelihood that research challenging the orthodoxy on the matter of innate gender differences as an explanation for the dearth of female scientists has been dealt a death blow. The only game in town now is socialization, i.e. men and women are no different; how they are socialized accounts for the differences.
Still, even if "feminism" completely explains Nancy Hopkins "savage" reaction, what then, I ask, explains the reaction of the men of Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the majority of the faculty? They are not threatened because they are not women or members of an under-represented group. So why go along with this?
For me, part of the answer lies in the ways these groups think about the world. They use the same language but talk past one another.
I stand by my assertion that remarks made by economists at a National Bureau of Economics Research symposium are not going to be well understood by biologists and literature professors. I further claim that this has nothing to do with the intelligence of either of these groups. They're just from different planets, an effect not attributable to gender.
"However, the stunt she pulled is echt feminist behavior, to wit: (1) She claimed that she was made physically ill by Summers' remark; (2) Summers' remark raises an issue that is hoary in feminist academic lore: are men "better than" women in whatever regard you care to mention; (3) The "better than" speculation is hoary precisely because academic feminists are mesmerized, deer-in-the-headlights, by any question that might suggest that males are more valuable, better than, getting ahead of, in short more enviable and powerful than women."
Ironically, Summers softened his assertion so much that it wasn't even a question of whether men are "better" than women merely more varied.
Summers made a point of saying that the average man and woman may be equal, but that once you get 3.5-4 standard deviations above and below the mean, men are predominant - and that this would possibly explain the relative lack of women nobel prize winners. So in effect, he was saying it was possible that there are a number of really smart men, and really stupid men. Not exactly "men are better than women."
Of course, Summers didn't take the hypothesis a step further, possibly because he was afraid: If the extremes are off, then there is no reason that the means are the same. There opens the can of worms, better to pretend everyone's equal, just because.
Hopefully this isn't a radical digression from the topic: I believe public purges like that done to Summers increase support to the ID movement. In our institutes of "higher learning" we continually see heterodoxy shouted down. In the case of ID, most evolutionists refuse to debate the topic in public and prefer to point to lack of acceptance in "peer-reviewed journals." Just so. We are in essence told to trust the experts and suspend any thinking on the subject. I've seen similar arguments from James Q. Wilson (social scientist) and other sorta-conservatives who fail to counter ID's arguments. If such esteemed gentlemen are convinced by the facts that ID is bogus, it would be nice if they would repeat such facts for the Great Unwashed. In Georgia and elsewhere we've seen school policies that merely categorize evolution as a theory or encourage critical thinking shouted down as "religious." This is the state of "higher thought" today. Sad.
brown line,
That's a scream! I've got a son trying to get into USNA or MROTC, and you've got my sentiments on the subject exactly. (Women in the military begs the same questions as the Harvard tussle.)
CLOWN COLLEGE MIMES PROTEST NEW PREXY SUMMERS
Sarasota FL - Newly appointed Ringling Brothers Clown College president Lawrence Summers prompted controversy at his inauguration speech today, after his remarks that "we must begin asking ourselves the tough intellectual questions -- why are clowns a leading cause cause nightmares? And why are mimes so universally loathed?"
The remarks prompted an angry, against-the-wind walk out by members of the mime department, with many faculty demanding censure and an apology.
"These remarks demean the entire campus miming community and demonstrate a blatant disregard for diversity," said Mime Department chair Harlequinette.
" ," added Professor Tin Tin, wiping an imaginary tear.
Harlequinette said she would propose 'no confidence' vote at next week's general faculty tiny car assembly, and said she had forward the Summers case to investigators at the college's Anti- Hate-Clowning Committee.
Summers was appointed to replace RBCC's outgoing President Peppy the Hobo Tuesday, after a troubled four year term at the helm of Harvard University. Harvard named Hobo as his replacement late yesterday.
In Cambridge MA, Women's Studies Director Kath Weston led the Harvard Faculty Senate in a rousing welcome for the incoming Peppy the Hobo, saying that "we at long last have a president who understands our important academic mission. He will leave here with very, very, very big shoes to fill."
Years back, I worked at a company where a much-beloved (but rather administratively-challenged, IMHO) boss retired and was replaced by a very competent ex-Coastie officer. A year or so thereafter, when my amazingly catty coworkers (all but one of them male) had STILL not managed to "forgive" the new boss for "displacing" the old boss (and, again IMHO, doing the job better to boot), the new boss had to fill a position for company safety manager. The previous safety mgr was (not coincidentally) married to my only female coworker, and was qualified for the job solely on the basis of OJT.
The new boss brought in an obviously very intelligent young woman with a terrific resume in the area of establishing efficient systems, but no specific safety expertise. My coworkers became enraged and called a secret meeting at someone's house after work one day. For three hours they b*tched about this young woman and the temerity of our boss in hiring her; I attended the meeting and sat with my back literally and figuratively against a wall defending the boss and the young woman as best I could, pointing out with as much diplomacy as I could muster that she came to the job with more qualifications than the previous guy had, and that our boss had been our strongest advocate in the company and had accomplished incredible things for our department.
To no avail. I left first; apparently after I was gone the rest formed a kind of committee to get rid of her. She was out in the field the next day with someone from our office (the cat-beller, evidently), who spent the entire time mocking and ridiculing her, and finally told her that she had no place in the office or the company and would soon be gone. She came in from the field, furious, and resigned.
I stayed on at the job; my boss and his peers were worth it. But I never misjudged my coworkers again; they revealed themselves in high-definition, so to speak, with their behavior. I'd venture that the Harvard students who so strongly support Larry Summers "won't be fooled again" either. They may stay at Harvard, they may take what they need from the weaklings who ran him off, but they'll never again feel a need to give those faculty the benefit of the doubt, if they ever did.
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