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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Embattled Harvard President Lawrence Summers braced for another contentious faculty meeting Tuesday, with debate planned on two motions -- one a vote of no-confidence, the other a milder rebuke for his management style and comments about women in science. Neither item would carry any official weight.

Why would a retired general, Fox News Military Analyst and father of two very high performing professional daughters have sympathy for the slow death being suffered by the President of liberal Harvard University? Glad you asked. In spite of coming from two different cultures we share one thing in common: we both have been victims of nutty faculty from elite universities. His story is well known. Now I can tell mine. Thanks, Larry, for giving me the excuse to bond by sharing…. My reward for surviving the Battle of Hamburger Hill was graduate school. The Army offered me two fully...

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...

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...

THE REAL scandal at Harvard is not that university president Lawrence Summers suggested, at a private symposium, that the small numbers of women in math and science departments at top research institutions may be due less to sex discrimination than to personal choices and inherent sex differences. The scandal is that his fairly innocuous, carefully hedged remarks sparked an irrational, intolerant outcry -- and that Summers was forced to offer groveling apologies in order to save his job. Now that the transcript of Summers's remarks at the National Bureau of Economic Research Conference on Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce...

Harvard University president Lawrence Summers has suffered acrimonious condemnation, and may have jeopardized his job, for suggesting that the underrepresentation of women in engineering and some scientific fields may be due in part to inherent differences in the intellectual abilities of the sexes. But Summers could be right. Some scholars who are in the know about the differences between mens' and womens' brains believe his remarks have merit. "Among people who do the research, it's not so controversial. There are lots and lots of studies that show that mens' and womens' brains are different," says Richard J. Haier, a professor...

Talk about your p.c. Talk about elitism and stereotypical behavior. Talk about what has happened — as Tom Wolfe does inter alia in his I am Charlotte Simmons — to the spirit of open inquiry in the most thin-aired realms of the American academy. The case of Larry Summers vs. the Harvard harridans has got it all. Six weeks ago Harvard's president Larry Summers — a former Secretary of the Treasury and not a conservative — gave a 7,000-word speech (president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/ nber.html) wherein he proposed "some questions asked and some attempts at provocation." The spirit of inquiry. At Harvard. What...

Cambridge, MassachusettsAT LAST WEEK'S HARVARD FACULTY MEETING, President Larry Summers saved his job, but he took a pummeling from his angry critics. Summers is easily the most outstanding of the major university presidents now on the scene--the most intelligent, the most energetic, as well as the most prominent. So, alarmed at his abilities and intentions, the Harvard faculty decided it would be a good idea to humiliate him.Summers has supporters, and not all the faculty joined in the game of making him look sick. But the supporters, like Summers himself, were on the defensive, making concessions, and the critics were...

HARVARD students and faculty members who want to burn Harvard President Larry Summers at the stake for his comments at an economic conference last month might want to consult a dictionary. Here is what Summers said when discussing the issue of women’s advancement in the hard sciences: “So my best guess, to provoke you, of what’s behind all 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. “In the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and...

In the meekest of ways, Harvard President Lawrence Summers has become something of a cause celebre among conservatives for challenging the ultra-liberal orthodoxy dominating American universities. It was meek because that wasn't what Mr. Summers had in mind when he suggested that genetic differences might help explain why more men pursue careers in the hard sciences and mathematics than women. But that's also the point: By daring to question the conventional thinking of his profession, however it happened, Mr. Summers committed the ultimate sin.

Quick quiz: which of these two statements do you find more offensive? (A) About under-representation of women in hard sciences: “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. I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong...” (B) About the victims of September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center: “True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic...

I was to be on a panel discussion at the AAAS annual meeting in Washington DC. I mis-remembered the time, though, thinking the event was at 11 A.M., when in fact it was at noon, so I had an hour to kill. Wandering around the conference center idly, looking for something interesting, I came across a meeting hall with an easel outside saying GENDER AND ETHNIC DIVERSITY IN ACADEMIC SCIENCE. Thinking this might be right up my street, I peered inside. About 30 people were listening to a woman lecturer. The people had their backs to me and were clustered...

In a last ditch effort to save his job, Harvard University President Larry Summers today compared female professors of math and science to Nazis, in a fashion reminiscent of Colorado Professor Ward Churchill's characterization of 9/11 victims. "Female math and science professors form a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire," Mr. Summers said, paraphrasing Mr. Churchill. "These little Eichmanns drive the mighty engine of profit to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved - and they do so both willingly and knowingly." The Harvard faculty greeted the statement with a standing...

WHEN WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY founded National Review in 1955 at the age of 29, he lit the fire that sparked the modern conservative movement. Buckley had already achieved notoriety--if not celebrity--with the publication of God and Man at Yale in 1951. He attacked the undergraduate education on offer at Yale for its hostility to Christianity and its adulation of collectivism and sought to dispel the indifference of Yale alumni to their supervisory responsibility, calling on them to grasp the nettle of university governance. Yale was, of course, only the example which laid closest to Buckley's hand. Mutatis mutandis, as Buckley...

THE PRESIDENT of Harvard University is in trouble. Larry Summers, who used to be Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, is guilty of the worst offence possible at an East Coast liberal university. He has committed free thought, based on evidence. Mr Summers pointed out that few if any women reach world-class levels in the hard sciences. He went on to suggest that this might tell us something about the difference between male and female brains.Poor Mr Summers: short of endorsing George Bush, he could not have said anything to make himself more unpopular. It is even possible that he may lose...

Like religious fundamentalists seeking to stamp out the teaching of evolution, feminists stomped Harvard University President Lawrence Summers for mentioning at a January 14 academic conference the entirely reasonable theory that innate male-female differences might possibly help explain why so many mathematics, engineering, and hard-science faculties remain so heavily male. Unlike most religious fundamentalists, these feminists were pursuing a careerist, self-serving agenda. This cause can put money in their pockets. Summers's suggestion -- now ignominiously retracted, with groveling, Soviet-show-trial-style apologies -- was that sex discrimination and the reluctance of mothers to work 80 hours a week are not the only...

Harvard President's Comments Underscored the Gender Bias We've Experienced Harvard University President Larry Summers touched off an international furor when he suggested that innate differences between men and women play a role in why there are relatively few women at the top universities in science and mathematics. Summers pointed to statistical "evidence" in the form of standardized test scores, noting that boys score in the top tier more frequently than girls. As academics and scientists across the country criticized these remarks, the media responded with accounts of angry (female) academics, balanced against (female) scientists who support Summers's assertion that differences...

GENDER STUDIES In Victorian times, scientists argued that women's brains were too small to be fully human. On the intelligence scale, researchers recommended classifying human females with gorillas. The great 19th century neuroanatomist Paul Broca didn't see the situation as quite so dire, but he warned his colleagues that women were not capable of being as smart as men, "a difference that we should not exaggerate, but which is nonetheless real." The president of Harvard University suggested that a lack of "innate ability" might help explain why women couldn't keep up with men in fields like math and science …...

Truth and Consequences By Kathleen Parker If I were Harvard President Lawrence Summers -- given Womanhood's reaction to his suggestion that innate gender differences might account for men's higher achievement in math and science -- I'd be sorely tempted at this point to say: "I rest my case." Or, alternatively, "... and the horse you rode in on." Instead, despite having apologized for speaking an unpopular truth, Summers will be the subject of an emergency faculty meeting scheduled Tuesday at which Harvard professors will discuss: What to do about Larry? Right off, I'd say give the man a raise for...

It seems that Larry Summers, a timid man mysteriously president of Harvard, has suggested that men might be better than women at mathematics. He has been beset by the fanged mouselets of academe, and is now busily cringing like a puppy who has wet the rug. We must not mention what the correct do not want to hear. Yet maybe we should. Let us reflect on differences between the sexes: Men are taller, heavier, stronger, more durable, and more enduring. They have higher erythrocyte counts, greater cardiac volume, build muscle faster with exercise, and are more strongly constructed. All of...