Free Republic

...But Keller doesn’t buy any of it. “It’s like a fairy tale: ‘Big rock from sky hits the dinosaurs, and boom they go.’ And it has all the aspects of a really nice story,” she said. “It’s just not true.” ...Keller’s resistance has put her at the core of one of the most rancorous and longest-running controversies in science. “It’s like the Thirty Years’ War,” says Kirk Johnson, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Impacters’ case-closed confidence belies decades of vicious infighting, with the two sides trading accusations of slander, sabotage, threats, discrimination, spurious data, and...

The House of Representatives has passed what I like to think of as Larry’s Law. The official title of this legislation is “Fulfilling the potential of women in academic science and engineering,” but nothing did more to empower its advocates than the controversy over a speech by Lawrence H. Summers when he was president of Harvard. This proposed law, if passed by the Senate, would require the White House science adviser to oversee regular “workshops to enhance gender equity.” At the workshops, to be attended by researchers who receive federal money and by the heads of science and engineering departments...

  The politically correct faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard passed a surprise no-confidence vote against Larry Summers last night:   Summers’ January remarks — off-the-record, he believed — prompted angry criticism from many faculty, students and alumni; others, however, defended him, saying Summers was simply engaging in a legitimate academic debate.The criticism quickly expanded into a broader attacks on the president’s allegedly blunt management style and his vision for the university, including major projects to expand Harvard’s campus across the Charles River in Boston, and his ideas about what direction scientific research should take.J. Lorand Matory, the anthropology...

In January of 1991, economist Lawrence Summers took a leave from his Harvard professorship and moved to Washington to work for the World Bank. His job was to create economic plans for countries in need of aid. It was a weighty task, but Summers relished the challenge. Using the kind of provocative imagery for which he would become notorious, he once explained that countries without a strong central government and vigorous private sector were like "a cripple . . . with no legs, pushing himself around on a crude board with wheels, surviving only with begging and trying to look...