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Members of Harvard University's governing board are mulling whether President Lawrence Summers should step down before a scheduled Feb. 28 faculty vote on a motion of no-confidence in his leadership, say people familiar with the matter. These people say members of the board, known as the Harvard Corporation, have become increasingly concerned that continued faculty discontent with Mr. Summers, a former U.S. treasury secretary, is hurting the university. Mr. Summers, who took over as president in 2001, has alienated some faculty members with a brusque management style and sometimes-outspoken views. The corporation names the president and is the only authority...

The kerfuffle over Bill Bennett’s recent remarks on his radio show – like the earlier kerfuffle over Harvard President Larry Summer’s remarks at a seminar, and like a dozen other such kerfuffles I no longer can recall – all stem from the same root: Creative and intelligent people – artists, writers, scientists, sociologists, economists and other public intellectuals – play with ideas. This is how they organize their thoughts, fuse them into new forms and eventually create the “finished” products that reach the public in the form of paintings, novels, scientific papers that change our understanding of nature, or essays...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) - Harvard has chosen its first diversity adviser, a position created after the university's president angered many faculty members when he questioned women's aptitude for top-level math and science. Lisa Martin, a professor of international affairs in Harvard's government department, will advise the dean of faculty on matters relating to gender, racial and ethnic diversity in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Martin said her job is to a craft a "long-term strategic vision" to "make sure that minorities and women at Harvard are in the best position to do their work." The faculty took a vote...

Harvard President Lawrence Summers continues to beg forgiveness for having wondered aloud whether "intrinsic human nature" might be one of the factors that explain the high male-to-female ratio in science. Among other things, Harvard has just announced it will spend $50 million on efforts to diversify the school's faculty, though it will not go so far as to make Summers wear a dress. Yet. The uproar at Harvard has generated enough hot air to dry out Phil Spector's white-man afro. But it also has generated some thoughtful discussion, such as a recent debate between Harvard psych profs Steven Pinker and...

When Yale awarded President John F. Kennedy an honorary degree, he said he had the ideal combination — a Yale degree and a Harvard education. Today he might rethink that, given the Harvard faculty's tantrum that caused President Lawrence Summers's cringing crawl away from his suggestion of possible gender differences of cognition. At least the phrase "Yale education" does not yet seem, as "Harvard education" does, oxymoronic.

There are moments when women reach peaceful coexistence with male colleagues; times that bring welcome sexual harassment sans federal involvement. Then feisty feminists stir the pot and set us back 20 years. They are once again flying twice backwards around their cages, squawking like wenches at drunken sailors. Larry Summers, pirate of the Caribbean, offended the women at a Mary Kay engineering conference in Cambridge, MA several moons ago. The flummoxing theme of this female whine-fest was "Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce," i.e., why aren't more broads scientists? Gathering in Cambridge, MA, was their first scientific mistake. The great...

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...