Summers: Women give birth better

This article is a part of The Daily Princetonian's annual joke issue. Don't believe everything you read on the Internet.

Former Harvard president Larry Summers, whose remarks that women may lack "intrinsic aptitude" in science helped spur his resignation last year, is again on the defensive after another controversial statement.

The contention revolves around a speech Summers gave this week to the Organization for Surgery, Health, Infection and Treatment, in which he suggested that women may be "intrinsically better" than men at giving birth.

"So my best guess, to provoke you, of what's behind all of this is ... the general clash between people's legitimate family desires [and the facts of anatomy]," Summers said, referring to higher rates of motherhood among women.

"There are issues of intrinsic aptitude ... I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong, because I would like nothing better than for these problems to be addressable simply by everybody understanding what they are, and working very hard to address them."

Many of Summers' peers in academia blasted his comments.

"As a former dean of a medical school, I was appalled at his lack of wisdom," molecular biology professor Leon Rosenberg said. "His comments were not only unwise, but uneducated."

At an Organization of Male Leaders student-faculty discussion, many of the two dozen participants expressed outrage over Summers' remarks.

"Take Jack Bauer, for instance," said OML president Sameer Hashish '07. "If Jack told you that he was going to conceive and bear a child, would you say he couldn't? Not if you wanted to remain conscious."

He went on to criticize Summers' comments as "a shameful instantiation of the essentially repressive, pseudo-masculinist-feminine discourse that enables — and indeed determines — the performative homonormativity of gender."

Politics professor Robert George, who overheard Hashish's comments thanks to an NSA wiretap forwarded to him by President Bush, defended Summers.

"What we're talking about here is the complementarity of the sexes," George said. "There's absolutely no justification for thinking that men and women should have equal rates of motherhood. That's just silly, fool."

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

Summers' comments have sparked rumors that Harvard may move to choose a man as its next president.

"We're very concerned that men may start to feel uncomfortable at Harvard," said one source close to the Harvard administration, who asked to remain anonymous because he is not authorized to discuss internal matters. "Naming a man to lead our university may offset some of the damage caused by Larry's remarks."

Potential Harvard applicants, though, seemed unaffected by the recent controversy.

"I'm really not bothered by what [Summers] said," said Milton McKenzie Chuzzlewhit III, a senior at Phillips Exeter Academy. "That's not to say I don't care. It would be great if Harvard started paying more attention to men. It's my one shot to be a minority!"