Summers Freezes

The Searchers
By R. K. In Daily Review Atlas, 4 March, 2005

A short while ago, it was announced that Richard Giese was moving on from his place as President of Monmouth College. Many of us will be sorry to see him go. Giese has done much for the campus, and has been good for the community, at the same time. His departure, of course, means that Good Old M.C. is (or has been) in the market for a replacement. For a day or so, I thought I had a brilliant suggestion: recruit Lawrence Summers.

For those who are drawing a blank on the name, Summers is the president of Harvard University, and the man who had the unmitigated gall to suggest that it might just be possible that one factor contributing to the low number of women teaching math and science may -- possibly, just maybe, but not definitely -- be a difference in physiology. Wow! I thought. How rarer than rarefied gas! A college administrator with the nerve to speak the truth about science! That’s the kind of guy we need!

After all, it has been repeatedly proven that men and women are different, both in appearance and operation. Our brain chemistries at birth are markedly different, and continue to be so throughout our days. Male humans have greater difficulty with learning language and nonverbal communications, females have greater challenges with studies involving logic. This doesn’t mean that women are incapable of logical thought processes, any more than it means men can’t put words together, but it indicates areas in which it takes added effort to obtain a degree of excellence. I know hundreds of male human beings who are unwilling to take the time to learn to communicate, and I’m sure there are equal numbers of women who have refused to figure interest on their automobile loans.

Meanwhile, Ted Hughes wrote brilliant poetry, and Marie Curie isolated radium. Linda Buck won last year’s Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine. John M. Coetzee won the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature. Mom balances the family’s checkbook, and Dad writes beautiful letters and stories. Just because you’re born one way doesn’t mean you can’t defeat it. Congenital obstacles were made to be overcome. Why, even a goofy-looking kid with jug ears could become heir to the throne of England and still marry the homely girl he loves.

But I digress. Larry Summers spoke the truth -- that there may be a chance that biological factors played a part in a university’s having under half its science department being women. For that, he was brought to public shame.

Had the affair ended there, with Summers on one side, and the rabid left, politically correct crowd still steaming on the other, I’d have been gung-ho for Summers to be hired to head up my alma mater, here. Unfortunately, Summers apologized. He caved in to political pressure, and retracted a truthful statement. And he did so within 48 hours.

I guess I was hoping for somebody who would stand up before the Inquisition and refuse to recant. After all, as the head of an institution whose purpose is ostensibly to discover and disseminate truth, Summers would be in a perfect position to open the debate to some real discussion, quite possibly shedding light on the one dark secret of today’s feminist movement -- that truth is less important than power.

For one brief, shining moment, Larry Summers almost resembled Perseus facing down the gorgon, Medusa. There, the shining shield of truth on his arm, he could easily have used the beast’s own gaze to freeze her, to bring facts back into the realm of credibility, instead of allowing somebody’s hurt feelings absolute reign in academia. But, in an instant, he lowered his shield and became just another would-be hero turned to stone under her baleful gaze. When he buckled under pressure from the fascist feminists, he effectively announced he was weak and powerless, even when armed with supportable data. Logic was defeated. Science was failed. Academia must fall back toward indoctrination once more.

Let us hope hiring committees at Monmouth College can (or are simply waiting to announce that they did) find somebody else besides the soon-to-be-available Summers. My old school can do better than to hire another monument to the terrible powers of modern sexism. They did okay last time, after all. They may not have gotten perfection, but they found better, it seems, than one ivy league school had. Maybe we can have a repeat performance of our recent history. Maybe they can even improve upon it. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.