SIVACRACY.NET

I put this up on Altercation today:

From: Siva Vaidhyanathan
Hometown: The Ivory Tower

Eric:

I appreciate your reticence about the Larry Summers resignation. But in your explanation you mischaracterized both what Summers said about women in science and you missed why he resigned as President of Harvard University.

Summers did not simply say "women may be physiologically different than men in ways that have unknown significance." At a conference session devoted to solving the serious problem of under-representation of women in the sciences he declared that biology might be a factor in their sparse numbers. As I explained on this blog at some length when it happened, certain traits are sex-linked. And no one is stupid enough to deny differences. But the problem is that doing science is not a "trait." It is not a simple set of aptitudes or tendencies. It is in fact not one thing at all. There are hundreds of ways to be a scientist. And women are underrepresented at all of them. They are less represented at Harvard than at other major research universities. That's the problem. It's his problem (or, was).

No one who claims that biology determines success in science can explain how there are more women scientists now than ever before or how every university besides Harvard has been able to increase their numbers in recent years. So Summers' claim was simply stupid.

Perhaps Summers resigned because men don't have what it takes to be president of Ivy League universities. After all, Brown, Penn, and Princeton in recent years have had great success with brilliant women as their presidents. Two of them had women scientists, in fact. All Summers had to do was look to his peers, all of whom were better presidents than he was. Instead he said something ignorant, ill-tempered, counterproductive, and simply wrong.

The reason Summers left now had nothing to do with his relationship with Cornell West or women. In fact, what he said to West was not nearly as bad as what he said about women. He only asked West to do some real scholarship. Frankly, West has not done any in decades. And I would even take issue with your positive comments about West's The American Evasion of Philosophy. It think he willfully misunderstands pragmatism so it covers his list of heroes. But that aside, driving West away from Harvard was also stupid. It was merely the first in a series of horrible mistakes.

What pushed Summers over was the fact that he openly practices cronyism. The faculty of Arts and Sciences was about to issue a second vote of no confidence against him. Why? As the Chronicle of Higher Education explains the reasons:

Chief among them was to be a motion to censure Mr. Summers for his role in what has become known as the "Shleifer affair," the professor said. Andrei Shleifer, a prominent Harvard economist and personal friend of Mr. Summers, was a defendant in a lawsuit alleging that he and a former staff member had defrauded the U.S. government through a program intended to help Russia make the transition to a market economy.

Harvard defended Mr. Shleifer throughout the litigation and last August agreed to settle the case by paying a $26.5-million penalty. Mr. Shleifer has never been disciplined by Harvard, and in fact was awarded a new chair during the litigation, said the professor who spoke to The Chronicle. As a result, Mr. Shleifer's relationship with Mr. Summers has drawn increasing criticism. The professor said the combination of the penalty and legal fees had cost Harvard $44-million.

The man was an incompetent university administrator. He was also a sexist and a blowhard. But those things never got a white man fired in America.