Free Republic

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)...

Harvard President Lawrence Summers said Wednesday in a statement on the school's Web site that he regretted not considering more carefully his remarks last week suggesting innate differences between the sexes could account for why fewer women succeed in science and math careers. "Despite reports to the contrary, I did not say, nor do I believe, that girls are intellectually less able than boys, or that women lack the ability to succeed at the highest levels of science," Summers said on the Web site. However, he wrote, "I was wrong to have spoken in a way that was an unintended...

Doing remarkably little to combat the stereotype that women are emotionally frail and constitutionally incapable of dealing with stress, Professor Nancy Hopkins of MIT told the Boston Globe that she had to leave a lecture delivered by Harvard president Larry Summers because if she didn't she would have "either blacked out or thrown up." What caused this damsel Hopkins to hie to her fainting couch? Why, the mere suggestion that there might be inherent differences between men and women when it comes to aptitude to the hard sciences. Summers, who happens to be one of the world's most-respected economists,...