Larry And The Hysterical Women 


Larry Summers has a problem with women. Not just any women, though: hysterical women. We all know the type: the ones that tee off on something trivial to throw a colossal hissy fit, screaming, screeching and hyperventilating. 

Summers is a former Secretary of the Treasury (in Clinton's second term), former World Bank chief economist, and former Harvard president. He's a conventional but imaginative free-market theorist, whose research has always been grounded in the scientific method (which makes him rare among social scientists and liberal-arts types). He's received a number of awards and is considered a likely future Nobel Prize recipient in Economics. (The one Economics prize that has so far eluded him is often presented late in a recipient's life as the capstone to a career. Economists avoid unseemly haste). 

His term as Harvard President was turbulent and ultimately ended early when a hysterical woman overreacted to an academic argument of his; and now he has been rudely dis-invited from a speaking engagement at UC-Davis when (go figure!), a hysterical woman overreacted to the news he was coming. 


At Harvard, the hysterical woman was MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins, the sort of mock "scientist" who studies "how women feel about biology." Hopkins is a first-generation feminist ideologue and an early recipient of the free ride that comes with affirmative action. On hearing Summers suggest that women were rarer than men in the highest levels of the hard sciences and engineering because of sex-linked cognitive differences, not in IQ medians, but in the shapes of IQ distributions (a very precise argument that comports well with psychometric data), Hopkins had the following scientific reaction: 

"I felt I was going to be sick. My heart was pounding and my breath was shallow... I just couldn't breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill...I would've either blacked out or thrown up."
So she ran from the room where Summers was speaking. His facts offended her! She seemed completely to miss that her reaction was exactly the sort that fed historic stereotypes of ineffective women -- but George Will and Heather MacDonald didn't.  Elsewhere in the blogosphere (literally and figuratively), Richard Fernandes saw Hopkins's tantrum clearly as one of a new wave of "attacks on freedom of speech."

Ultimately, free speech lost; Hopkins won. Although undergraduates wanted the brilliant Summers to stay by a 3-1 margin, the highly politicized faculty of Arts and Sciences, led by Hopkins in a all-out Wagnerian Valkyrie assault via friendly reporters at the Boston Globe and on network television, voted no-confidence in him; he resigned before a second vote could be taken. Liberal law prof Alan Dershowitz called it a coup d'etat.

At UC-Davis, the hysterical woman was Maureen Stanton. Stanton is a 1970s-vintage battleaxe feminist, and a professor of "Evolution and Ecology" who's ridden affirmative action grants and fellowships at first-class schools to a second-rate scientific career at a second-string university. Perhaps conscious of her inability to cogently dispute Summers's ideas, and apparently ignorant of his ideas, Stanton demanded he be banned from the campus. Summers, Stanton screeched, represented "gender and racial prejudice." So Regents "chair" (he apparently lacks the equipment to be a "chairman") Richard Blum quickly pulled the plug on his speech. Reaction was quick and critical, except by Summers, who gently expressed regret at the cancellation. 

For more on Summers, this excellent article from the Harvard Crimson covers his rise in politics, and some of his less-known prior controversies. A careful reading turns up hints that his public reputation may be more a product of pack-hack journalism than any failings of his own. 

Few of the stories on Summers report what became of him after he plummeted from Harvard's pinnacle, where a pedestrian mind focused on racial bean-counting now stands. After being dismissed as President, Harvard hired Summers back as a university-wide professor -- one of a small number of its most prestigious research professorships. Why? They don't want the tokens getting shirty, but they don't want to see that coming Nobel associated with Yale or Chicago either. 

One interesting note is that, although academic left-liberals often attack him as too conservative to be allowed to speak, he's only worked for Democrats (Dukakis, Clinton) and Democratic or liberal institutions (Harvard, the World Bank). While his economics are far too free-market-oriented to please the humanities faculty at Harvard, which ranges all the way from Trotsky to Mao, such free-market Treasury leadership was a major building block of Bill Clinton's presidential successes. 

If you're at Harvard or MIT or UC-Davis, you probably can't see that. If you're at Harvard or MIT or UC-Davis as an unqualified token, you definitely can't see that. 


Posted: Tuesday - September 18, 2007 at 09:13 AM          

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