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February 18, 2005
Advice for Harvard
Christina Hoff Sommers tells us where Harvard President Lawrence Summers went wrong, and has some advice for the faculty
Here here.Summers’s mistake was to think he could talk freely about gender issues on which campus ideologues have staked out very definite positions. He had been assured that the talk was merely for provoking discussion and that it was to be off the record. But by entertaining the hypothesis of innateness, before an audience with a fair number of gender-is-a-social-construction dogmatists, he left himself vulnerable to a feminist attack. Now he has been forced to recant and atone. He has apologized not once but three times. “I was wrong to have spoken in a way that has resulted in an unintended signal of discouragement to talented girls and women.” Harvard professor Ruth Wisse has compared him to a prisoner in a Soviet show trial.
But of course Lawrence Summers is not a prisoner in a closed society. He is a powerful, intelligent man in an important leadership position, with a well-deserved reputation for being independent and courageous. It is in fact quite uncharacteristic for him to behave as he has. That he feels constrained to do so attests to the inordinate political power of the gender warriors on American campuses.
Instead of apologizing, Summers should have considered sending the Harvard Faculty Standing Committee on Women copies of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, with the suggestion that they read it carefully and take its teachings on open discussion to heart. As for those in his audience who style themselves “the country’s most accomplished scholars on women’s issues,” he should refer them to some elementary texts on the canons of scientific evidence.
Note: You'll need to be a paid subcriber to National Review in order to view Dr. Sommers article in it's entirety.
Posted by Tom at February 18, 2005 12:39 PM
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