EDITORIAL – Harvard pres.’ comments stupid, not sexist

It should have been part of grade school health class, but in case people missed it, we’ll say… It should have been part of grade school health class, but in case people missed it, we’ll say it anyway: Boys and girls are different.

If Harvard President Lawrence Summers hadn’t put his foot down his throat, we wouldn’t need to say this. At an economics conference last month, Summers remarked that there may be some biological basis for the dearth of women in scientific fields. This remark, taken to insinuate that women were biologically inferior to men, has drawn fire from academics and the media.

But it’s oversimplifying the situation if we just call Summers a chauvinist (and it seems that’s what most commentators are doing) and move on. Though he’s spewed apologies since the scandal hit, thereby avoiding a no-confidence vote by the Harvard faculty, there’s also a small amount of evidence supporting his statements.

A recent Associated Press article reports that some experts have found evidence indicating that there are differences in intelligence between men and women — differences based not on IQs but on the type of intelligence each gender has. For instance, there’s some evidence that men do better on tests of spatial tasks and women do better on verbal memory tests. There’s also some evidence that slight variations in the tests will even out these results, so this whole debate might just be about which tests either gender has more test anxiety about.

The important thing to notice about this is that the people doing the research are experts in their fields. Summers, former secretary of the treasury, doesn’t have such expertise. As Harvard’s president, he’s qualified to speak on behalf of other qualified people, but not to pretend to be an authority on the subject.

Moreover, with a lousy tenure rate for female professors — of the 32 professors offered tenure at Harvard last year, only four were women — he’s not the person to be speaking on the biological basis of gender equality issues.

In short, Summers was speaking out of school about a scientific subject that’s better left, well, to the scientists. Still, all the flak he has taken is unfair. While he was the World Bank’s chief economist in 1992, Summers published a paper that advocated dramatically increased investment in educating girls in developing countries — surely not the work of a chauvinistic pig, which is what he’s been made out to be. While Harvard’s current treatment of female faculty is hardly admirable, calling names and spitting vitriol surely isn’t a good solution either.

There’s some merit in keeping outspoken people on university faculties. Summers said something that has enraged the otherwise dry-as-dust world of academia, but at least it has people talking. Can we even imagine Chancellor Mark Nordenberg risking controversy or even saying anything that declarative? Well, given the fiery outrage over Summers’ comments, maybe being daring is better left to professors rather than high-ranking administrators.

His remarks weren’t appropriate, because he had little evidence to back them up. But calling him names or writing off the debate entirely is just as simplistic as his original misguided argument.