Ward Churchill's comments made me feel like I was going to be sick. My heart was pounding and my breath was shallow. I was extremely upset. I get homocidal rages over this stuff. Then I get violent fantasies.

But I have to defend his right to speak.

Sean, what about my anti-Semitism? You didn't mind that.

http://www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=41;t=000183

Chris, you were obviously being sarcastic in your "anti-semitic" post, though your analogy about smokers and Jews was idiotic. Your first post in this thread was not anytihng like that- you were obviously attacking and belittling the women who were offended by Summers' speech.

Sometimes I think that you must just post things when you're stoned out of your mind or something, they're so nonsensical. What the hell was that "darky" thing supposed to be about, anyway?

And yes, Churchill and Summers both have the right to speak, and you and I both have the right to be horribly offended, angry, and think they're full of shit. In Summers's case, however, it sounds like he's a lousy administrator who regularly antagonizes the faculty, which is more pertinent to his likely being fired than any one set of comments.

Man, those lightbulbs don't turn on too often, but when they do you can see 'em for miles.

It's hard to tell the difference isn't, Jack, between a joke and conservatives?

Man, this just keeps popping up. From the NYTimes:

Furor Lingers as Harvard Chief Gives Details of Talk on Women
By SARA RIMER and PATRICK D. HEALY

Published: February 18, 2005

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Feb. 17 - Bowing to pressure from his faculty, the president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers, on Thursday released a month-old transcript of his contentious closed-door remarks about the shortage of women in the sciences and engineering. The transcript revealed several provocative statements by Dr. Summers about the "intrinsic aptitude" of women, the career pressures they face and discrimination within universities.

Dr. Summers's remarks, which have only been described by others until now, have fueled a widening crisis on campus, with several professors talking about taking a vote of no confidence on the president next week. That idea alone is unprecedented at Harvard in modern times.

Among his comments to a conference of economists last month, according to the transcript, Dr. Summers, a former secretary of the United States Treasury, compared the relatively low number of women in the sciences to the numbers of Catholics in investment banking, whites in the National Basketball Association and Jews in farming.

He theorized that a "much higher fraction of married men" than married women were willing to work 80-hour weeks to attain "high powered" jobs. He said racial and sex discrimination needed to be "absolutely, vigorously" combated, yet he argued that bias could not entirely explain the lack of diversity in the sciences. At that point, the Harvard leader suggested he believed that the innate aptitude of women was a factor behind their low numbers in the sciences and engineering.

"My best guess, to provoke you, of what's behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon - by far - is the general clash between people's legitimate family desires and employers' current desire for high power and high intensity; that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude; and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination," Dr. Summers said, according to the transcript.

"I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong, because I would like nothing better than for these problems to be addressable simply by everybody understanding what they are, and working very hard to address them," he added.

Over and over in the transcript, he made clear that he might be wrong in his theories, and he challenged researchers to study his propositions.

He also urged research on "the quality of marginal hires" to the faculty when efforts to diversify are under way. How many of these hires, he asked, have "turned out to be much better than the institutional norm who wouldn't have been found without a greater search?" Or are "plausible compromises" that are not unreasonable additions to the faculty? And "how many of them are what the right-wing critics of all of this suppose represent clear abandonments of quality standards"?

Several Harvard professors said they were more furious after reading the precise remarks, saying they felt he believed women were intellectually inferior to men.

Everett I. Mendelsohn, a professor of the history of science, said that once he read the transcript, he understood why Dr. Summers "might have wanted to keep it a secret."

"Where he seems to be off the mark particularly is in his sweeping claims that women don't have the ability to do well in high-powered jobs," said Professor Mendelsohn, part of a faculty group that sharply criticized Dr. Summers's leadership at a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on Tuesday. "There's an implication that they've taken themselves out of that role. But he brings forward no evidence."

Howard Georgi, a physics professor who has been part of a successful effort in his department to recruit women for tenured positions, said, "It's crazy to think that it's an innate difference." He added: "It's socialization. We've trained young women to be average. We've trained young men to be adventurous."

After releasing the 7,000-word transcript, Dr. Summers said in a letter to the faculty that he should "have spoken differently on matters so complex" and that he had "substantially understated the impact of socialization and discrimination."

"The issue of gender difference is far more complex than comes through in my comments," he wrote.

The senior member of Harvard's governing corporation, James Houghton, released a letter after the transcript was made public, offering praise and support for Dr. Summers.

In recent weeks, the Summers controversy has led to a wider debate among academics about not only sex differences but also the state of campus political correctness - with Dr. Summers's supporters insisting that a left-wing cabal on the faculty was seeking to bring down his presidency over his remarks.

Among his critics on the faculty, the current outrage against him amounts to a culmination of reaction to three years of sharp-edged remarks, actions and displays of attitude that to these professors have been divisive and unworthy of one of the world's leading universities. Dr. Summers gained notoriety several months into the job by offending a leading professor of black studies at Harvard, Cornel West, who promptly decamped to Princeton University.

Yet some Harvard professors and leaders said that the critics were focusing too narrowly on remarks that were meant to be private and provocative, and that they were losing sight of Dr. Summers's accomplishments at the university.

"My primary response to the transcript is that President Summers has profoundly apologized," said Edward Glaeser, a Harvard economics professor who is a strong supporter of Dr. Summers. "At this point the university will be much better served by looking forward rather than by parsing his comments."

After the transcript was issued, Dr. West volunteered his reaction to the latest imbroglio.

"I've been praying for the brother, hoping he would change," Dr. West said in an interview. "It's clear he hasn't changed. I feel bad for Harvard as an institution and as a great tradition. It was good to see the faculty wake up. The chickens have come home to roost."

While Harvard professors plan to convene Tuesday to discuss the transcript and Dr. Summers's leadership, and some have spoken of a vote of no confidence, it is the Harvard Corporation that has decisive influence over Dr. Summers's fortunes. It stood behind him on Thursday.

Several female scientists who were at the National Bureau of Economic Research forum and who expressed outrage at Dr. Summers's remarks there said they felt vindicated. Critics had accused them of misinterpreting him and overreacting out of political correctness.

"I'm glad his words are finally out there," said Shirley Malcom, who grew up in segregated Alabama and is now the director of education for the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington. "Because so many of us have been accused of implying that he said things he did not, and now people can actually judge for themselves."


Sara Rimer reported from Cambridge for this article, and Patrick D. Healy from Albany.

full transcript of Summer's remarks here:

http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html

Men and women are biologically different.

Case closed.

From Summers' remarks

So from the get go, we know he's intending to provoke. I guess that worked out for him.

The difference between a positivist approach is a key on in economics. And since this was a conference sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research, it's a distinction economists would have gotten (as far as I can tell his critics come from other disciplines). In a nutshell, a positivist approach attempts to describe the world as it is. Normative approaches ask the question "how should the world be". Not that this dichotomy is without criticism from the heterodoxy, but it's well understood to exist by the mainstream.

I agree with this statement 100%.

Here are is three reasons (I think these are four reasons but it's his speech)

Note that he lists innate differences as the SECOND cause. Not the only cause or even the primary cause.

His description of the the mechanism behind the first reason.

He then goes onto say that current research may prove him wrong on this.

This is where he started to get controversial. Note that he is forming a hypothesis that the representation in science and engineering is less than in other high paying fields. And note that he is not talking about average performance, his point is about the variance. Not that women are inferior as individuals, but that because of the average variance, we can expect more men at the top (and the bottom) of the aptitudes.

Wow, he quoted specific research and a methodology to how he reached his conclusion. Now it's on his critics to come up with a cogent critique, one that goes beyond "I know a lot of smart women". Note that he does not like his result, he's not a chauvinist, he just believes the evidence indicates a difference in aptitudes at the high end.

Now his most vocal critics were saying that the research he referred to was refuted earlier in the conference, but nobody in the popular press has bothered to make those critiques available for popular consumption.

Then he makes his dumb remark about daddy trucks and baby trucks.

But then he says:

So 1) more research is showing biological reasons for things that used to be assumed due to socialization and 2) women are educating themselves in the field longer than they used to.

Which is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't account for the possibility that encountering discrimination in early adulthood has a chilling effect on continuing study in the field. This is a point that should be heavily criticised.

But then he goes on to discuss discrimination generally:

So he doesn't deny discrimination, and goes on to point out the mechanisms that result in passive discrimination.

The second point is the one I was trying to make about the market for researchers beating discrimination out of the system. Now this will only happen if the preference for discrimination on the part of the discriminators is not pervasive.

He summarizes the first section of his remarks:

He then goes on to propose research in several areas and then a Q & A with this ironic exchange:

Now we have seen. I think Summers was an idiot for not releasing this sooner. He offers reasoning, citations to research, and testable questions to support his "guess" on the reasons. While his position my not be popular, and may ultimately be wrong, I don't think there is anything wrong with what he said, or the way he said it (except maybe for that baby truck thing).

All I have to say is no sexist women better come along and DARE suggest -- however gingerly they choose to coat it -- that innate differences of WHATEVER kind make me ANY less likely to excel in child-rearing or home-making than a woman. Because I'm sure she'd be talking about me personally, you know? What a woman can do, I can damn well do just as well. I am my own person. I am an individual in command of my own destiny. Nothing is going to determine who I am or what I do. If I want to raise children I'll raise children. If I want to be a ballerina I'll be a ballerina. I don't have to hunt and play football and manipulate the stock market. Nobody can force me to. Some bitch suggests otherwise then I WILL HAVE HER ASS FIRED. Stupid sexist deserves everything she gets.

As to Summers ... all that tiptoeing, hedging, and careful qualification of his statements -- and still, we see the result. Nausea, homicidal fantasies, and a collective desire to take away the man's livelihood. Idiotic.

A professor at my old university once asked an overweight girl in one of his classes to stand up and turn around. Then he made a comment along the lines of "I just wanted to see how you fit into that chair."

THAT is unprofessional, discriminatory behavior.

I had a lot of professors in college who put forward theories or ideas I disagreed with or disliked. I didn't call for their heads. I still liked them and figured they were just one person and I was there to draw my own conclusions.

K

Hmm, Dean, I wonder what Summers might attribute a mother's desire to spend more time with her kids to if he attributes science and engineering aptitude to genetics. It's not much of a jump to simply merge his first and second points together to get his most important factor for the underrepresentation of women in the sciences, biology. He's just some guy who's using his own beliefs to defend the status quo by vaguely referencing a field of study that he doesn't know much about. However, he happens to be the president of Harvard.

I return to the point that there's nothing to suggest one has to be in the top 1% of aptitude to excell at operating within what Kuhn calls normal science. Now, intuitively revolutionary scientists might just be in the top percentile, and would therefore be more likely male, but we can't even be sure of that. Why not see what happens with a different social approach before we make any strong claims one way or the other about how much biology makes the current situation necessary?

Where exactly does he make this jump? Or are you just some guy using your own beliefs to project on to Summers?


Down in the Q&A section there is this exchange

Seems to me that Summers is allowing for the possibility that under a different set of expectations of work for those on a tenure track, the outcome would be different.

He also says :

Now it's possible that for white men it's a valid life choice, but that women are being discriminated against. It's even possible that there is a new discrimination against white males. But it also suggests that those jobs will go to those individuals (men or women) who are willing to work the 80 hrs per week.


He goes on to discuss several avenues for research into the issue of whether or not the "mommy track" really matters, or whether the 80 hr work week is really necessary. Sentiment summed up in

Of course he's defending his beliefs. Now we can either take him at face value and say he came by those beliefs as a result of reading of the research available or we can say that he is a chauvinist who is selectively reading the research and presenting it in a way to support his bias and the oppressive status quo. Seems to me that if his take on the data is supported by the studies themselves and is not refuted by any work he ignored through oversight or willful obsfuscution, it doesn't matter how he came by his beliefs, be it careful consideration of the issues or a youth spent in the He-Man Woman Hater's Club. If the evidence is correct, he's right no matter how he came by the beliefs.

While Summers may not be a biologist, he is an economist, and one field that economists of his stature are intimately familiar with is discrimination. I get the impression from his remarks that his placing discrimination behind biology is a result of his take on the economic literature of discrimination (quoting Becker's research for example), and that any residual variance is not as likely due to discrimination as it is to some other source. Particularly in light of the advancements that have occurred in fields like law and medicing at the same time. I say that's an issue that needs some study.


How much of what Kuhn calls normal science is really just grunt work in a lab grinding out studies that support the theories put into play by the revolutionary scientists? Seems to me that if it is a significant piece of it, then someone spending 80 hrs per week is going to be able to get more accomplished on average than someone spending 40 hrs per week (Even allowing for diminishing productivity).

And it's probably irrelevant. Even the intuitively revolutionary scientists are going to have to put in their time as "publish or perish" grunts, to get the standing and grant money to pursue revolutionary research.


He suggests a couple in his remarks including expanding child care opporunities and potentially extending the time to tenure.

He also makes it clear

The word "legitimate" is the key here. There is no need for any remediation of these legitimate desires. He does suggest though, that if the desire for "high power and high intensity" is not necessary for effecient productivity in the relevant fields, that changes to the tenure track might serve to bring addtional gender equity.