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E-mail Author Send to a Friend <% printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Print Version March 22, 2005, 7:54 a.m. Who Stole Harvard?Big Sisters and Larry Summers. By Christina Hoff Sommers The Harvard faculty of arts and science just last week passed a motion expressing a lack of confidence in the leadership of President Lawrence Summers. Such censure is unprecedented in Harvard's near 400-year-history. Summers unwittingly stepped on the third rail of university politics when he speculated that innate differences between the sexes might be one reason there are fewer women than men at the highest echelons of math and science. To...

Princeton’s feminist president March 17th, 2005 After Harvard University president Lawrence Summers dared to suggest that innate differences between men’s and women’s aptitudes for high-level math and science careers may be one of the reasons for the lower percentage of female math and science professors at major research universities, the National Organization for Women angrily demanded his resignation. Summers’ speculative remarks, though controversial, are supported by substantial theoretical and empirical evidence. Nevertheless, NOW president Kim Gandy sees in them an example of “personal sexism” and lack of a “true commitment to inclusion.” According to Gandy, “equality for women” requires that...

In 1937, H. L. Mencken offered some advice to the son of the publisher Alfred A. Knopf. ''My guess is you'd have more fun at Yale than at Princeton, but my real choice is Harvard,'' he wrote. ''I don't think Harvard is a better university than the other two, but it seems that Americans set a higher value on its A.B. If I had a son I'd take him to Cambridge and chain him to the campus pump to remain there until he had acquired a sound Harvard accent. It's worth money in this great free Republic.'' And so it...

Harvard Faculty, University Leader Meet By JUSTIN POPE The Associated Press CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Harvard President Lawrence Summers faced another round of tough questions from disgruntled faculty Tuesday, but avoided a no-confidence vote in a meeting participants described as collegial.

Dr. Larry Summers, Harvard's president, remains under siege for remarks made in his Jan. 14 address to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Dr. Summers suggested that there might be three major reasons why women are underrepresented in the higher reaches of science and ranked them in order of importance. First is what Dr. Summers calls the "high-powered job hypothesis," where success demands putting in 80-hour weeks, and men are more willing or capable to do so. In support of how marriage and family impact women's careers, he added that when one does see women in the higher reaches...

  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...

Associated Press 03/15/05CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences passed a no-confidence vote in President Lawrence Summers (search) on Tuesday, the latest setback for the embattled university leader who has come under fire for his managerial style and comments on women in science.

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...