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What (Most) Women Want A review of Taking Sex Differences Seriously by Steven E. Rhoads By Christine RosenPosted May 16, 2005This review appeared in the Spring 2005 issue of the Claremont Review of Books. Click here to send a comment.   That men and women are different is an accepted tenet of popular culture— indeed, the success of everything from reality television shows to self-help books relies on the notion that la difference is a fact that yields happy, challenging, and occasionally comic results in the course of everyday life. The acknowledgment of difference has also provided fuel for...

PC types unhappy with Harvard President Larry Summers' candor about women in science may not like any better his thoughtful analysis of a swept-under-the-rug problem with the nation's public schools. That is unfortunate, because Summers is on to something in his concern that public educators, in rightly focusing on helping lower-achieving kids, are dumbing down the curriculum for top courses. In the process, they may be pushing many of the best and the brightest into private schools. Summers did not suggest that such was happening on a widespread scale. Yet the exodus from public schools by many high-achievers whose parents...

On April 22, 2005, Harvard University's Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative (MBB) held a defining debate on the public discussion that began on January 16th with the public comments by Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard, on sex differences between men and women and how they may relate to the careers of women in science. The debate at MBB, "The Gender of Gender and Science" was "on the research on mind, brain, and behavior that may be relevant to gender disparities in the sciences, including the studies of bias, discrimination and innate and acquired difference between the sexes". It's interesting to note that since...

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) biology Professor Nancy Hopkins recently sparked a media maelstrom that mercilessly hounded Harvard President Lawrence Summers, eventually leading him to multiple mea culpas and Soviet-style gender-sensitivity reeducation. But this isn’t the first time feminist “It” girl and Machiavellian publicity-hound Hopkins has drawn headlines for outing alleged gender bias in the Ivory Tower. Summers tried in vain to have academia’s feminists check their gender politics at the door during a conference organized by the National Bureau of Economic Research on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce. He provocatively offered up three “positive” (free of value judgment)...

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...

In the realm of political defeats, last month’s no-confidence vote in University President Lawrence H. Summers probably ranks somewhere below the Bolivian government’s execution of Ernesto “Che” Guevara in 1967. But after three months of battle with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Summers has risen to Guevara’s height of pop-culture martyrdom with a new t-shirt modeled after the famous image of the Argentinian guerilla leader. “The only similarity is that they’re both revolutionaries,” said Aaron J. Mowery ’08, who began selling the Summers tees last week. “Granted, Che was a communist,” noted Mowery, a member of the Harvard Republican...

Columbia Unbecoming is on the whole just a series of complaints having to do mainly with manner or etiquette in the classroom, but the real issue has to do with the meager and politicized content that professors choose to teach. As Efraim Karsh, head of the Mediterranean Studies department at King’s College, University of London, implied on March 6 in Uris Hall, Massad’s classroom hysterics are not the real problem. The real problem is a polite and affable man like Professor Khalidi, who nevertheless peddles political propaganda in class, propaganda masquerading as real scholarship.Two articles in the March 23, 2005...

Very much in the news are attempts, glancing and full-fledged, to trim the extravagances of the First Amendment. Sometimes freedom-mongering betrays itself, causing the observer to assume comfortably that a sober integration of free speech in the House of Rights is more or less on its way. But the fight needs pursuit. The season's headliner was Harvard President Larry Summers. What he said was that he fancied that not as many women as men get on with science and engineering, perhaps because there is a genetic indisposition there, women to science. Knoweth not the fury of liberal faculties, the man...

In what he called "a landmark deal" with female faculty members, Harvard University president Lawrence Summers agreed today to wear a dress through the end of the 2005-6 academic year. The embattled Harvard president, who created a ruckus when he seemed to question women's ability in the fields of math and science, said that he hoped wearing a dress would demonstrate that he was "trying to be more empathetic" to women's concerns. Dressed in a stylish Chloe dress and looking somewhat unsteady in his Manolo Blahnik slingbacks, Mr. Summers appeared at a press conference looking very much like a man...

The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University hosted a conference last week entitled "Impediments to Change: Revisiting the Women in Science Question." The auditorium in Agassiz Theatre in Radcliffe Yard was packed. Dedicated in 1904, the theatre has been the site of many a spirited intellectual exchange. But on this day it was a forum not for debate but for indignation over the insult that the assembled referred to as "1/14" -- the date when Harvard President Larry Summers fatefully speculated about the possibility of inborn differences between the sexes. The six assembled panelists, four from Harvard, two...

There are some interesting parallels between the state of the Catholic Church prior to the reformation, as recounted by William Manchester, and the state of the professoriate today. When the Harvard Faculty conducted its Diet of Worms and voted "no confidence" in its President, Lawrence Summers, perhaps this was equivalent to excommunicating Martin Luther.

<p>A few years ago, one of my sisters-in-law came to town with two of her kids, a boy and a girl. Over ice cream the adults in the group said: Let's assume that everyone involved in the Terri Schiavo controversy has operated in good faith. In other words, let's imagine that Michael Schiavo isn't a homicidal money-grubber; that the Republicans aren't political opportunists performing a Kabuki dance for the right-to-lifers; that the so-called evangelicals really do care deeply about Terri Schiavo and are not fighting a cynical proxy war against abortion; and that the Democrats siding with the Florida courts' decision to starve Terri to death are not doing so out of a reflexive petulance toward anti-abortion and conservative forces.</p>

Back in 2002, when Harvard President Lawrence Summers asked then-Harvard professor Cornel West to cut back on his hip-hop recordings and return to serious scholarship, for which the university was paying him, after all, West went straight to the media and charged Summers with being insensitive to African-Americans. What followed was a game of power politics, which Summers won decisively. West's primary complaint was that Summers had "disrespected" him and everyone else who shares his skin tone. Avoided entirely was the substance of Summers' request. Illuminated with floodlights was how that request made West feel. Predictably, a small chorus of...

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.