Summers Time
Ken Doyle, The University of Minnesota

Harvard University President Lawrence Summers has been on the receiving end of more brickbats than even an Ivy League president deserves. More important than justice for Dr. Summers, however, are issues of missed opportunity and issues of academic freedom.

The transcript of Dr. Summers's remarks at a January 14 conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce shows clearly that he didn't say the scurrilous things he was reported to have said; on the contrary, it shows that he enthusiastically supports the same fundamental goals his critics espouse. The transcript also shows that, just as a leader of scholars should, he posed important and provocative questions he hoped his faculty would research. To see the infamous transcript, click HERE.

Dr. Summers affirmed Harvard's commitment to diversity, and lamented the fact that the paucity of women in science and engineering means a shortage of role models for succeeding generations of potential scientists and engineers. He urged his faculty to explore all the reasons that might cause women to step off the academic career path.

He did not say, as many have suggested, that there's no discrimination against women any more, and no adverse socialization. What he did say was that outright discrimination and early socialization are less of a problem now than are two other factors:

• Differences in Variance. Although he doesn't think there's a difference between means of the men's and women's distributions of science-and-engineering talent, however measured, Dr. Summers does think the men's variance may be somewhat greater than the women's -- a little higher on the high end, a little lower on the low end. At the rarified levels on which these elite searches operate -- four standard deviations or so above the mean -- even a very small difference in variation could mean, relatively speaking, quite a few more males available for the hiring process.
• Employer Expectations. More important still, Dr. Summers hypothesized that requiring faculty to be physically in their offices an enormous number of hours a week -- and, when not in the office, to be thinking about the job and nothing but the job -- may discourage qualified women from joining the science and engineering pool. He urged employers to explore different job arrangements and compensation models so women aren't required to make harder decisions along family lines than men are.

He certainly did not, as some have alleged, dismiss discrimination on the grounds that there are too few qualified women to bother with. Just the opposite: he described the small pool of available women as not just a local problem but a national problem.

He did not, saints preserve us, say that women are "genetically inferior to men," nothing like it. He said that the behavioral genetics revolution has taught us to pay more attention to the biological side of aptitudes than we used to, and he urged his audience not to grab on to discrimination and socialization explanations simply because they're easier to correct.

As evidence to support his argument, he described the well-known Israeli experiment in which kibbutzim tried mightily to erase socialized gender roles, and failed miserably. Despite the most intense efforts to expose boys and girls to occupations traditional for the opposite sex, individual choice always tilted toward traditional roles.

He buttressed the Israeli finding with a personal anecdote, and paid a price. In their own personal effort to cancel out traditional socialization, he and his wife bought toy trucks rather than dolls for their two-year-old twin daughters … until the day he saw the girls start to say things like, "Look, the Daddy Truck is carrying the Baby Truck!" Critics immediately attacked him for bringing his children into the debate. Heaven save us.

Dr. Summers concluded:

So my best guess, to provoke you, is that [the main factor] by far is the general clash between people's legitimate family desires and employers' current desire for high power and high intensity [employees] -- 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 [because socialization and discrimination would be easier to correct].

Missed Opportunities
The Summers Affair is not just a story of misinterpretation and misunderstanding, accidental or intentional. It's a story of missed opportunity.

From my vantage, Dr. Summers did a masterly job of challenging the Harvard Science and Engineering faculty to marshal its best thinking to help solve an important social problem. He offered the baton to several different groups. Nearly everybody dropped it, and some used it as a weapon to strike back.

Some of the groups, and the opportunities they missed:

• Those faculty like Professor Nancy Hopkins, who left the meeting early because, as she rushed to tell the media, Dr. Summers's remarks made her feel as though she were going to throw up. Instead of establishing a vital and intellectual debate from the get-go, Professor Hopkins's rant created a personal and emotional confrontation.
• Dr. Summers's political opponents at Harvard, who saw in his tribulations a chance to even the score with a president who had forced a change in their inflated grading practices, encouraged the under-productive Cornel West to flee to Princeton, and generally ruled the roost with firm-set jaw and iron hand. They too traded debate for the politics of personal destruction.
• Reporters and news writers who, unable or unwilling to understand the nuances of Dr. Summers's argument and wanting to define the issue in simple black and white, framed the affair not as an effort to solve a problem but as a confrontation between good and evil. Instead of helping their readers understand Dr. Summers's cutting-edge thinking, they obfuscated his message.
• Talk-show guests who misconstrued the argument to the point that both "rightie" Sean Hannity and "leftie" Alan Colmes threw up their hands in despair. These guests too could have helped define the "marketplace of ideas." Instead, they embarrassed themselves, and, far more important, helped make radio and TV audiences wonder what kind of thinking is going on in today's colleges and universities.
• National NOW leaders who recently demanded Dr. Summers's resignation without, it seems, having even glanced at the transcript or talked with reliable informants. NOW leaders could just as easily have demanded the immediate and thorough study of all possible reasons why there aren't enough qualified women in the elite hiring pools. Instead, they took the sensational route, apparently on the basis of hearsay that fit their prejudices.
• The presidents of MIT, Princeton, and Stanford, who recently issued a joint remonstration of Dr. Summers on grounds no stronger than NOW's. More than any other group, these three presidents should have joined the call for scholarly investigation of the questions Dr. Summers raised. Instead, they produced a curious op-ed piece (available HERE) for the Boston Globe that criticized Dr. Summers by proposing essentially what he proposed, e.g., "a culture, as well as specific policies, that enables women with children to strike a sustainable balance between workplace and home." More than curious, however, the essay is frightening because it urges that scholars not explore possible genetic contributions to the problem: "Speculation that 'innate differences' may be a significant cause of under representation by women in science and engineering may rejuvenate old myths and reinforce negative stereotypes and biases." This medieval position is reminiscent of the dictum (attributed to Gloria Steinem) that we should not study sex differences because we might find some.
• Academics around the country who have participated in a brawl instead of an intellectual debate of the sort we're trained for, and in the process scandalized the laity.
  

Curiously, one of the few players in this game who has done nothing to be sorry for has apologized five times now, and that is Dr. Summers himself.

The Challenge to the Academy
On the basis of considerable reading and thinking, Dr. Summers proposed important new directions for research, just as scholars are supposed to do -- an exercise in academic freedom and responsibility. But he was widely criticized for doing so, especially by his academic colleagues and peers. So maybe the best thing about this episode is that it poses a crucial question: Do we academics deserve the protection of academic freedom and tenure, or do we not?

My answer is straightforward:

• To the extent we are ready, willing, and able to address the kinds of questions President Summers raises with the attitude and tools of the scholar, then, yes, we deserve the freedom to explore, hypothesize, criticize, debate, conclude, and publish without fear of recrimination, because that freedom is essential to our task; but
• To the extent we descend into petulance, prejudice, and power politics, we forfeit any claim to that protection because we are failing in the essential responsibilities of our position.

It's easy to be a scholar when the questions we're addressing are dry and dusty. It's far harder when those questions address issues about which people care passionately. But addressing important questions boldly and dispassionately is our job, and nobody promised that the livin' would be easy.

NAS5:39 PM