Title IX in Science: It's Not a Game Anymore
D. Rayner (the pen name of a professor at a Southern University)

Thomas Sowell, in his definitive critique of group preferences "'Affirmative action': A worldwide disaster," points out that such preferences, intended for the disadvantaged, are soon extended widely. Pretty soon, any group that can make a politically persuasive case can get on the bandwagon: "Clearly, no recitation of the historic oppressions suffered by blacks can justify preferences for white, middle-class women, whom some believe to be the principal beneficiaries of the acceptance of the preferential principle" he wrote in 1989. You bet! Welcome to 2005 and Title IX! now, incredibly, to be extended from sports to scholarship:

"Two U.S. senators accepted a petition on Wednesday that asks Congress to do something about the limited involvement of women in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering," reported the Chronicle of Higher Education on May 12. "An in-depth investigation of the problem," the petition says, "should include the cultural factors and economic factors affecting women in these fields, possible gender discrimination in these areas, federal laws that may help address any inequities, including Title IX of the Education Act, and specific actions that may help increase opportunities for women." "I would like to see us do with Title IX for academics what Title IX has done for sports," said Senator Ron Wyden, a deep-thinking Democrat from Oregon.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about this new effort is the arguments offered for installing female quotas in science and engineering. "Discrimination" is of course one, although evidence for discrimination is weak to nonexistent in most scholarly fields, many of which are dominated by women. Other arguments are interesting for their schizophrenic view of women, and for their bizarre logic. A sample:

Women in science said Jocelyn Samuels, vice president for education and employment at the National Women's Law Center and one of the organizers of the petition, suffer from "lack of mentors and role models, lower salaries than their male peers, and unequal access to resources."

• lack of mentors: How wonderfully vague! Does this mean that women have fewer teachers than men? That they stand more in need of help than men? Perhaps they do, a traditionalist might think (the weaker sex and all that). But surely this is not something a gender-equality feminist would support? But of course many do -- how schizophrenic! How like a woman!
• lack of role models: This is an old chestnut. But what is a "role model" for an aspiring scientist? A mature scientist? A mature scientist of the same gender or race? Tell that to all the Asian students who flock to U.S. universities. Any scientist for whom science is a vocation rather than a job will tell you that what inspires is dedication to the field, not skin color or chromosome type. Again the persuasiveness of the argument rests on an assumption of the frailty of women. (But if they are so frail, why would we expect them to succeed in competitive fields like science? Why would we even want them to try?)
• lower salaries: First of all, this isn't even true -- there are no statistical disparities between the salaries for men and women (according to a recent equity survey) in my own university, for example. And if it is true elsewhere, there are obviously at least two possible explanations, lower performance by women than men being one. Once again, Tom Sowell had it right: In his section on "Statistical Disparities," Sowell wrote: "The idea that large statistical disparities between groups are unusual -- and therefore suspicious -- is commonplace, but only among those who have not bothered to study the history of racial, ethnic, and other groups around the world."
• unequal access to resources: I think this derives from the complaints of some women at MIT that they had less lab space than men they regarded as their peers. The MIT report on gender equity is so massively flawed (see Judith Kleinfeld's critique) that little reliance should be placed on it for any public policy purpose.

But perhaps the most bizarre argument for female preferences was offered by (wouldn't you know!) a man, master of profundity Ron Wyden, who opined that: "having more women involved in the sciences and engineering would help the nation remain a global leader in technology and innovation." I see, so encouraging more members of a group that is, as a whole, less interested in science than men, less able to compete in scientific fields, and as psychometric tests clearly show, less able on average at the high end of scientific abilities, will "help [us] remain a global leader in technology."? What unbelievable nonsense!

Moreover, statistics also show that women who get PhDs have on average 1.6 children by the time they are 40, whereas high school dropouts have 2.6. There's a statistical disparity for you! Senator Wyden's plan would ensure that even more intelligent women have even fewer children. I wonder what effect this will have on America's future?

NAS1:14 AM

The Ward Churchill / Larry Summers Harmonic Convergence
David J. Rothman

I feel for Larry Summers. No doubt the president of Harvard University, beleaguered by charges of insensitivity to women and minorities, had thought that, after years spent in the corridors of international power, academic administration would be a breeze. Complex as it may have been, however, to help manage the largest economy in the history of civilization, I can imagine Summers spends his share of time this spring pining for the good old days, when all he faced was a trillion-dollar balance sheet instead of a daily public flogging.

In a recent turn of events, Summers's case seems to have converged with that of Ward Churchill (who memorably compared 9/11 victims to "little Eichmanns") in something out of a surreal opéra bouffe, with results that can only make extremists of both sides strut and preen. The entire situation is instructive for what it tells us about the contemporary American university and the profound importance of historiography. Yes -- I said that the issue at stake in this case is that most sexy of subjects, historiography.

The Summers/Churchill convergence occurred on the front page of the Harvard Crimson in a story about 17 September 2004 remarks by Summers that "deeply offended" several scholars at a Harvard conference on Native American studies. The story was picked up by the Boston Globe and ran there the following day. So Summers now is seen as being insensitive to the very group whom Ward Churchill claims so stridently to represent.

The Crimson has posted a transcription of his remarks in which Summers gingerly ventures into speculation on several explosive issues. It was a discussion, he presumably thought, that would be apprehended with a certain neutral distance:

[I]t seems to me that the really profound question . . . is how one finds a way of defining both identity and assimilation. How does one on the one hand respond to what is a strongly felt pride and identity in Native American communities that leads Native American communities to want to congregate, to want to self-govern, to want, in many points in many times, to be an island in the ocean of our society; and at the same time, how does one avoid what I don't think is good for anybody, which is a sense of dependency on the larger society, a reliance on financial transfers from the outside, a view in terms of special programs that have an aspect of charity and response to charity. How do we define this balance in a way that is healthy on both sides? I don't know the answer. I don't even have confidence that I've posed the question in the right way. Because it is both a question of what happens consciously and through plan, and it is also a question of what happens inadvertently.

You know, there are people in this room who know infinitely more about this than I, but I had occasion some time ago to read a little about the demographic history of the United States in terms of the relative sizes of the European immigrant population and the Native American population and what happened to the Native American population. It doesn't, it's not the kind of stuff that tends to find its way into the hooray-for-America-style history books. But what actually comes out if you study it, and I think this is relatively established fact, is that for everyone who was killed or maimed in some attack by European-descended Americans on the Native American population, for every conscious death that came in war, ten were a consequence of the diseases that came to North America with the European immigrants. There are fragmentary accounts of a kind of early biological warfare. You know, let's wrap a blanket around somebody who has smallpox and then encourage some other people to use that blanket. But the vast majority of the suffering that was visited on the Native American population as the Europeans came was not a plan or an attack, it was in many ways a coincidence that was a consequence of that assimilation. Nobody's plan. But that coincidence caused an enormous amount of suffering. And it speaks to the tremendous importance of us all reflecting on what we do consciously and of what are the innocent by-products -- or the non-innocent by-products -- of the policies that we pursue in our country on everything from questions of welfare to questions of federalism to questions of how highways are built to questions of how we preserve the environment.

Summers has come under intense fire for these remarks. According to the Crimson, Michael Yellow Bird, director of the Center for Indigenous Nations Studies at the University of Kansas, has called Summers's comments "really, really insulting." The Globe article quotes Kay K. Shelemay, Watts Professor of Music at Harvard and a member of the Committee on Ethnic Studies, which sponsored the gathering and invited Summers, as follows:

I don't see how one can portray the history of Native America in terms of Euro-American settlement as unconscious . . . . It is not comforting to people who have seen their societies disrupted and their ancestors diminished in such a way, to be told that it was the outcome of unconscious actions.

This is the tenor of most of the responses.

Summers, when pressed, cited factual sources for his comments. As the Globe reported,

Summers's spokesman said he was influenced by having read several pieces, including Jared Diamond's Pulitzer-Prize winning book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, and a September 2004 article by Guenter Lewy in the conservative magazine Commentary. Lewy argued against claims that Native Americans were the victims of genocide, saying "the most important reason" for the Indians' catastrophic decline "was the spread of disease to which they had no immunity."

It is worth pointing out here that Guenter Lewy is a meticulous scholar who has spent much of his career documenting Nazi genocide. In 1999 Oxford University Press brought out his The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies, which was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2000.

I should add that I've known Lewy my entire life -- he was a colleague of my father -- and while I do not always agree with his views, his careful, thoughtful work exemplifies how to approach the most difficult historical issues. Indeed, he sets a high and inspiring standard.

In contrast to Lewy's persistent search for and valuation of truth, Shelemay's critique of Summers for "not comforting . . . people who have seen their societies disrupted and their ancestors diminished" suggests an entirely different range of values for historical discussion. Assuming she is being quoted accurately, her primary criterion for attacking Summers's comments seems to be that they do not provide solace or healing to those who are suffering or to the descendants of people who have suffered. This is a fascinating charge, for it suggests that the primary benefit that should accrue from the study and discussion of Native American history is healing, especially for those who are its primary subject. If I understand Shelemay correctly, the purpose of studying history in this case is to comfort those who have been its victims.

Despite the citations to the research on which he had relied, and despite its pedigree, Summers quickly apologized publicly, as reported in both newspapers, saying:

I did not mean for a moment to diminish the severity or ferocity of the widespread violence that claimed very many [Native American] lives. My aim was to point to the need for conscious efforts at Harvard and in the nation more broadly to contribute to the prosperity and health of Native American communities. I regret if my remarks were understood otherwise.

But given the nature of the response to his original comments, such an apology is unlikely to make anyone happy. The reason it will not lies in plain rhetorical view both in what Summers originally said and in his apology. It is arguably an important part of the mix in Summers's conflicts with the Afro-American Studies Department as well, and even close to the root in the debate over his comments about gender. To sum it up in a word, Summers is relying on a very different historiography than his opponents.

Summers is an economist. In the final sentence which I excerpted from his talk above, it seems clear that what Summers is trying to do -- perhaps clumsily -- is to put his expertise to work and examine the long-term effect of social programs, which provide economic transfers to disadvantaged groups. In his view, well-intentioned charity can inadvertently create hurtful dependency when institutionalized; in this, he argues, such programs are comparable to the inadvertent results of intercultural contact, such as the spreading of disease.

Even in his apology, Summers is still hewing to a certain ideal, both in method and message, trying to think about the effects of national policy on disadvantaged groups, his view being that instead of fostering dependency, we should formulate policies that help such groups to improve their own condition through economic empowerment.

Oops -- this approach and Shelemay's historiography are intellectual ships passing in the night. Whatever Summers's intentions, many members of his audience did not hear his comments as he intended. What they heard instead was an attempt to avoid acknowledging the horrific slaughter of Native Americans by European immigrants to the New World. They didn't want an explanation, a lecture, or a solution; they wanted to be comforted.

Perhaps it is easy for some readers to dismiss such a desire, and thereby to underestimate it. This is a serious mistake. The impulse to avoid or to mollify pain -- or to take revenge for suffering -- that grows out of the facts or even the contemplation of history lies deep in the human heart. A moment's reflection suggests that such an approach to history is in and of itself a major agent of political and social behavior throughout the world, justifying the bloodiest actions.

Every society has painful episodes in its history and in its present. Every society's search for ways to deal with the difficulties in its past in ways that do not somehow perpetuate anger, fear, and violence is fraught with danger. To serve justice, the law, the truth, and the needs of civil society and simultaneously to appease ghosts is far from easy and the world stage is littered with countries that cannot do it and therefore wind up stuck in endless cycles of conflict and violence. This is why the very few institutions whose mission is supposed to be to seek truth above all else -- Veritas -- to value it more than healing, more than comfort, more than justice (the prerogative of courts, not of colleges), more than anything -- are so rare and precious.

What seems to be clear is that many of those in Native American Studies -- where the game seems to be advocacy and not necessarily understanding -- do not want the passions to cool, or feel that they cannot cool, and so would prefer to hear a talk from Ward Churchill than one from Larry Summers.

NAS4:26 PM