You might think that the faculty at America's most prestigious colleges would be a pretty open-minded bunch. After all, they are supposed to be dedicated to exploring and testing new ideas. They claim, moreover, to value such things as ethnic and racial diversity precisely on the grounds that different kinds of people will bring new ideas and challenge the status quo. Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard, has just discovered that the very opposite is true. When he was asked to speak at MIT on the progress of women in academia, he was explicitly invited to be provocative. He managed to...