Larry Summers: Harvard's heretic at the stake

Our administration's response to President Summers' remarks on the question of a genetic factor affecting the proportion of women among elite science faculties reminds us that the liberalism of the liberal education has painfully sharp boundaries.

Liberal academics will cling to genetic determinism when it serves their agenda to do so, as with the diktat that homosexuality is genetically determined. They ignore the preponderance of empirical evidence to the contrary — for example, a number of identical twin studies all suggesting a correlation between baseline and 50 percent. They ignore the admitted surprise of sexuality researchers with avowedly progressive agendas upon finding so small a correlation. The new Magisterium has decreed that since its social agenda is best served by genetic determinism, determinism we must have.

Genetic determinism is suddenly anathema, however, when considering the status of women in science. Here, the liberal's aim is not the normalization of deviant behavior, a cause standing to benefit from genetic explanations, but the justification of inferior performance, which requires a scapegoat — a billy scapegoat, not a nanny goat. Any contradiction of the dogma that the masculine world prevents the female from assuming equal rank is rejected as heresy. Consider the threat from the Society of Women Engineers signed by our own Dean Maria Klawe: "we are concerned with the suggestion that the status quo for women in science and engineering may be natural, inevitable, and unrelated to social factors." The petitioners are concerned not with the science behind the suggestion, since science serves them well elsewhere in their ideologies and indeed in their careers, but with a proposition that something "may be." Honest science concedes that something "may be" until disproved, but Klawe would have us reject determinism in this narrow instance as a possibility which ought not to be explored.

President Tilghman commits the same crime against science. Along with the presidents of Stanford and MIT, she too claims that Summers has crossed the line with questions better left unasked. She worries that such "speculation" might "rejuvenate old myths and reinforce negative stereotypes and biases." In other words, open inquiry is less important than protecting somebody's feelings.

Not only does our administration stifle inquiry, it also restates Summers' argument disingenuously. Our administration construes Summers' speech as a proposal centered exclusively on genetic determinism and a denial of discrimination, but Summers plainly asserted that "surely there is some" overt discrimination on the basis of sex. He even suggested that another deterrent is the same tenure process Professor Tilghman famously called a "dirty trick" and "no friend to women" but which she has not attempted to reform. Consider Tilghman's statement: "The question we must ask as a society is not 'can women excel in math, science and engineering?' — Marie Curie exploded that myth a century ago — but 'how can we encourage more women with exceptional abilities to pursue careers in these fields?'"

The question she attributes to Summers is not his at all. Summers speculated that one reason males outnumber females on science faculties at elite universities might be that, as some research suggests, the standard deviation of male intelligence exceeds that of the female, meaning that the male sex provides more Gomer Pyles as well as Einsteins. The mere existence of Marie Curies has no bearing on their distribution. En route to telling us the question we ought to be asking, Tilghman assumes equal proportions of female Einsteins, presumably chained to their ovens. Tilghman fails to address her assumption of equal distribution, which is where the difference of opinion actually lies. She appeals not to reason but to the liberal faith.

Four hundred years later, Galileo is still prisoner to ideology. Liberal academics have betrayed our trust in scientific questions from global warming to homosexuality. Strangely, it is a Clintonite I find myself defending; when the mob lacks victims, it will turn on its own.

Play the man, Doctor Summers. Your immolation shines as a desperate candle in this new Dark Age, an age not of inquiry but of Inquisition, with Tilghman as Torquemada. Veritas? I weep. John Andrews is an ORFE major from Oliver Springs, Tennessee. He can be reached at jandrews@princeton.edu.