Lawrence Summers appears to be stuck in a Harvard version of "Groundhog Day," as he issued his Fifth Apology to 500 members of the Harvard faculty meeting yesterday in Lowell Hall. According to the New York Times report of the meeting:
After five weeks of mea culpas for his remarks about women in the sciences, Dr. Summers issued yet another apology. He promised professors that they would no longer experience the intimidation, anger and hurt feelings that many of them have reported in his three-and-a-half-year tenure.
But the Crimson report of the meeting makes it clear that even Apology No. 5 was not enough, and that Summers now faces a series of new meetings, at which he will undoubtedly apologize again, followed by a vote:
At the start of the meeting, [Dean of the Faculty William C.] Kirby announced he will be convening a series of informal discussions before next month’s regularly-scheduled faculty meeting on March 15 for professors to further air their concern with Summers’ presidency. . . .
At today’s meeting, Professor of Physics and of Applied Sciences Daniel S. Fisher became the first faculty member to publicly call for Summers’ resignation. . . . [A]fter the meeting, Professor of Anthropology and of African and African American Studies J. Lorand Matory said . . . he plans to put a vote of "no confidence" on the docket for the next Faculty meeting, scheduled for March 15.
Anne Applebaum, writing in today’s Washington Post, has an interesting take on the controversy that sparked the current Inquisition:
I suppose it might be interesting to debate whether the tiny group of men with an innate genius for advanced mathematics outnumbers the tiny group of women with the same innate talent, as Summers recently suggested.
Nevertheless, it seems odd that so much of the great Larry Summers flap . . . has focused on the potential bars to female achievement that are the least relevant to the rest of us.
To be more precise, it’s puzzling that so much of the conversation about Summers left out the central point of his controversial presentation, focusing instead on only two of the three explanations he offered for the dearth of tenured female scientists at Harvard University: innate ability . . . and discrimination . . . .
In fact, leaving aside the infinitesimally small world of math geniuses, there isn’t any evidence that men are more intelligent than women, and no one seriously says so. Outside of a handful of institutions, the evidence of unthinking discrimination is slim too.
It is true, of course, that men continue to earn more than women — approximately $1 for every 75 cents that women make. But economists such as June O’Neill or Harvard’s Claudia Goldin, who have accounted for different job choices, hours worked and time taken off for raising children, have concluded that it is these factors, not discrimination, that account for most of the difference.
And that is the point: Too often the missing component of the debate about the dearth of tenured female scientists, or female chief executive officers, or women in Congress, is the word "family."
But Summers did call the work-vs.-family choice the most important problem for women who want tenure: In academia, as in other professions, high-powered employers "expect a large number of hours in the office, they expect a flexibility of schedules to respond to contingency, they expect a continuity of effort through the life cycle, they expect . . . a level of commitment that a much higher fraction of married men have been historically prepared to make than of married women."
It isn’t ability or discrimination that hold women up most, in other words, but the impossibility of making a full-time commitment to work in a culture that demands 80-hour weeks, as well as to family in a society unusually obsessed with its children. . . .
I’d feel a lot more sympathy for Summers’s current plight if he’d said how ridiculous it is to require academics, male or female, to work 80 hours a week to get tenure. . . .
People may feel a lot more sympathy for Summers’ current plight if they read the full text of what Summers said. Here is what he said on the issue Applebaum identified as the heart of the problem, and which Summers himself guessed was the number one reason for women’s plight:
Maybe it would be helpful to just, for a moment, broaden the problem, or the issue, beyond science and engineering.
I’ve had the opportunity to discuss questions like this with chief executive officers at major corporations, the managing partners of large law firms, the directors of prominent teaching hospitals, and with the leaders of other prominent professional service organizations, as well as with colleagues in higher education.
In all of those groups, the story is fundamentally the same. Twenty or twenty-five years ago, we started to see very substantial increases in the number of women who were in graduate school in this field. Now the people who went to graduate school when that started are forty, forty-five, fifty years old.
If you look at the top cohort in our activity, it is not only nothing like fifty-fifty, it is nothing like what we thought it was when we started having a third of the women, a third of the law school class being female, twenty or twenty-five years ago.
And the relatively few women who are in the highest ranking places are disproportionately either unmarried or without children, with the emphasis differing depending on just who you talk to. And that is a reality that is present and that one has exactly the same conversation in almost any high-powered profession.
What does one make of that? I think it is hard — and again, I am speaking completely descriptively and non-normatively — to say that there are many professions and many activities, and the most prestigious activities in our society expect of people who are going to rise to leadership positions in their forties near total commitments to their work.
They expect a large number of hours in the office, they expect a flexibility of schedules to respond to contingency, they expect a continuity of effort through the life cycle, and they expect — and this is harder to measure — but they expect that the mind is always working on the problems that are in the job, even when the job is not taking place.
And it is a fact about our society that that is a level of commitment that a much higher fraction of married men have been historically prepared to make than of married women. That’s not a judgment about how it should be, not a judgment about what they should expect. But it seems to me that it is very hard to look at the data and escape the conclusion that that expectation is meeting with the choices that people make and is contributing substantially to the outcomes that we observe. . . .
Another way to put the point is to say, what fraction of young women in their mid-twenties make a decision that they don’t want to have a job that they think about eighty hours a week. What fraction of young men make a decision that they’re unwilling to have a job that they think about eighty hours a week, and to observe what the difference is. And that has got to be a large part of what is observed.
Now that begs entirely the normative questions — which I’ll get to a little later — of, is our society right to expect that level of effort from people who hold the most prominent jobs? Is our society right to have familial arrangements in which women are asked to make that choice and asked more to make that choice than men? Is our society right to ask of anybody to have a prominent job at this level of intensity . . . .
Exactly the question Applebaum said she wished Summers had asked.
He was speaking exactly the way an intellectually engaged, morally concerned president of a major American university should speak: discarding the convenient, politically correct positions, identifying the heart of the problem, addressing it in an objective fashion, and challenging scholars to study it more.
But since Summers is not dumb, it will not likely happen again. Not after five apologies and counting. Not after pledging to 500 people never to do it again.
Arnold Kling, writing at Tech Central Station ("Ego, Testosterone, and the Academy: Why the Controversy Over Larry Summers is Important"), captured the nature of today’s academy and of Summers’ true plight (hat tip: Anne):
At the University of Maryland, my oldest daughter, Rachel, took a class in which one test included a question in which she was asked to respond to the statement "Gender is socially determined."
This was given, not as an essay question, but as a machine-graded true-false choice. Having read the textbook for the class, Rachel knew that the machine would treat "true" as the correct answer.
She herself believes that the answer is something other than "true." Perhaps, if given an opportunity, she could have written a thoughtful, balanced essay on the topic. Evidently, however, her professor does not have a sufficiently open mind to be willing to face such an essay.
The question facing Lawrence Summers as he gave his talk was, "True or false: the explanation for the high ratio of males to females in physics, math, and engineering at universities like Harvard is cumulative sex discrimination."
Evidently, the textbook answer is "true." Instead, Summers gave a thoughtful, balanced essay answer that was something other than "true." For that, many modern academics, including some smug critics at MIT and other prestigious institutions, believe he deserves a bad grade. . . .
[T]he biggest danger on campus today is not discrimination against women. It is discrimination against thinkers like Lawrence Summers and my daughter, who should not be forced to affirm propositions that they believe are complex and far from completely true.