Posted on 02/23/2005 2:34:34 PM PST by pabianice
Ex-professor at Clark rips ‘gender police’
"We’re dealing now with a religion of hard-line feminism
While the president of Harvard University continues to engage in marathon mea culpas, Christina Hoff Sommers said she’s not surprised that the poor guy has been pilloried for committing a cardinal sin in academia: suggesting that men and women might indeed be different.
“If you even hint that there’s a biological difference between the sexes — which most scientists agree there is — a small coterie of hard-line gender police will get very excited and start shrieking,” Ms. Sommers maintained. “They insist that any suggestion of gender difference is based on discrimination, rather than common sense and empirical science.”
Ms. Sommers knows a bit about academic pillorying. In the early 1990s, she was a philosophy professor at Clark University and an outspoken critic of what she called victim-oriented, gender feminism, which she claims has hijacked independent thought on American college campuses. Her attacks on the movement raised the hackles of feminists around the country, including here at the College of the Holy Cross, when in 1995 the founder of the women’s studies program made headlines by refusing to even debate her.
Today, Harvard professors plan to discuss the leadership of their president, Lawrence Summers, who last week released a transcript of his controversial remarks at a conference about the shortage of women in science and engineering. In those remarks, which so enraged one of the attendees that she said she felt sick and had to leave the room, Mr. Summers suggested that bias could not entirely explain the lack of diversity in the sciences and that other factors, such as genetics and family pressures, deserve consideration.
It should be noted that he repeatedly qualified statements in his wide-ranging talk as his “best guess,” and he stressed that racial and sex discrimination should be “absolutely, vigorously” rejected. And this is how he concluded an academic lecture that has sparked a firestorm and calls for his resignation:
“Let me just conclude by saying that I’ve given you my best guesses after a fair amount of reading the literature and a lot of talking to people. They may be all wrong. I will have served my purpose if I have provoked thought on this question and provoked the marshaling of evidence to contradict what I have said. But I think we all need to be thinking very hard about how to do better on these issues and that they are too important to sentimentalize rather than to think about in as rigorous and careful ways as we can.”
Ms. Sommers left Clark in 1997 and is now a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. She’s the author of two books, “The War Against Boys” and “Who Stole Feminism?,” which attacks the excesses of feminist correctness and debunks several myths perpetuated by the women’s movement, notably that violence against women rises on Super Bowl Sunday.
Like Larry Summers, she’s been a high-profile target of academic feminist furor. Unlike Mr. Summers, she’s never felt compelled to apologize for speaking her mind, likely because she’s never been the president of the nation’s most prestigious university.
“I’m sorry he had to apologize,” she said over the telephone yesterday from her home outside Washington, D.C. “But unless you’re ever so careful about what you say, and it’s politically correct, you have no future in an American university. There’s no freedom of expression anymore. We’re dealing now with a religion of hard-line feminism, which is dominant on campus. He’s been accused of heresy. He’s not a true believer in this religion, and that’s why he gets in trouble. Maybe he didn’t realize there were religious precepts he had to obey.”
While she calls herself an old-school feminist who believes in equal rights for women, her critics accuse her of shoddy scholarship and of building a career by unfairly attacking feminist issues. In 2001, after being invited to deliver a speech at a federal conference, she was told to “shut the (expletive) up” by a male professor at Fordham University as she defended her claim that science should help evaluate the effectiveness of gender-based drug prevention programs for kids.
Ms. Sommers calls her feminist critics “easily offended and chronically aggrieved,” and she wryly noted the response to Mr. Summers’ speech by Nancy Hopkins, the MIT professor who said she was sickened.
“Instead of calling a doctor, she called The Boston Globe,” Ms. Sommers said. “Normal women sitting in that room didn’t feel the way she did. But this is a one-party system and dissidents are not invited to the table. There’s no place for independent women.”
She noted that scientific studies have uncovered brain-based, biological differences between the sexes, much of them dealing with spatial skills, which may give boys an advantage in math. Which is not to say that girls can’t excel in that field or any other; it simply means that differences exist.
Today, though, for daring to broach the topic, Mr. Summers will be “harangued and discredited” by a vocal segment of the Harvard community, Ms. Sommers predicted. And he’ll likely apologize yet again, all because he raised valid, provocative questions in an environment that should encourage a lively give and take of ideas.
“He won’t be fired, but he’ll be weakened,” Ms. Sommers said. “It would be sad if he were to become bland. For me, it only shows that things are even worse today than when I was at Clark.”
dwilliamson@telegram.com
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And the moon may be made of velveeta.
There's no difference between genders!
I saw an interesting book the other day (don't have the author and title at work with me right now.) It was about how gender differences affect education, not because men and women have different learning capacities but because men and women have different learning styles and timing. According to this book, the language center of an 8-year-old female's brain is more developed than that of an 8-year-old male's, but the reverse is true with science. That doesn't mean each is less capable, but it will take longer for the male to develop in language skills and he might need different learning methods, while the female will experience that with science.
In the author's view. by ignoring gender differences our education system ignores that kids may need different things and may develop at different rates based on gender. But if an 8-year-old boy feels "dumb" at reading compared to girls while the girls feel "dumb" in science, the education system hasn't helped either.
...for reading.
feminists are nothing more than ugly women trying to fit into society.
When's the last time a guy looked atround the table at a restaurant and asked, "Who has to go to the Men's room?" 'Nuff said?
I think the current educational system ignores much more than just gender-based differences in learning. But, that opens up a whole different can of worms.
I don't think the government education system does anybody a whole lot of good the way things are going nowadays. Ideally each child should have their own educational plan based on strengths and weaknesses that take into account a whole myriad of issues - but there just isn't a way to do this effectively in the government school system. Even most private schools can't do this for each child.. (That's why we homeschool but I understand that's not an option for everyone...)
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