Free Republic

Those of you who have not been vacationing on Tierra del Fuego for the last three months will surely remember the sad sight of Larry Summers dressed in gray long-underwear and cutaway coat, a squashed top hat on his bowed head, carrying a sandwich sign—Dump on Me!—round and round Harvard Yard. The surrounding crowd, members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, stood around brandishing razor sharp ibids and op. cits, screamed imprecations at poor Larry. "Colonialist," they shouted, "quagmire," came the response from the junior faculty lately released from their library carrels who weren't quite sure of what was...

Larry Summers, the President of Harvard, has come under fire from feminists for suggesting that women have not excelled as well as men in science and engineering because of inferior intrinsic aptitude, among other reasons. Now, no one denies that women are different physically from men, and it is clear that those physical differences can affect how the sexes behave; it is not disputed that men in general are physically more aggressive than women because of stronger upper body strength and the influx of testosterone. Where Summers got into trouble, however, was declaring as if it were a fact that...