Some say Summers is supposed to heat things up

Last week, Harvard President Larry Summers received some vehement criticism over remarks he made that there may be innate differences between men and women's abilities in math and science. Yet Summers also had strong defenders, those who felt that "provoking" scholars and encouraging debate is exactly what more university leaders should be doing. One was Richard Freeman, a Harvard labor economist who organized the academic conference where Summers spoke. In fact, Freeman was blunt on this point, comparing Summers directly to his predecessor in the president's office, Neil Rudenstine, a man known for cautious consensus-building. "People who know Larry know he's going to get people worked up and make them think," Freeman said. "The previous president would've said some ridiculous inanities, and I never would've invited him."

OLD NEWS A Harvard alumna who specializes in women's history in higher education wrote in to point out that a previous Harvard president created a flap with his remarks on women -- in 1889. According to a 1999 Harvard Magazine piece, Charles W. Eliot chose the inauguration of a new president at Wellesley College to point out that society "has not made up its mind in what intellectual fields women may be safely and profitably employed." Eliot said women's college should be schools of manners, because of women's "delicate qualities." He added there was no need for grades, frequent exams, and prizes, since women would work hard without such incentives. "It would be a wonder, indeed, if the intellecutal capacities of women were not at least as unlike those of men as their bodily capacities are," he said. While this was probably not quite as controversial in his day, it did spark a response from the Bryn Mawr president, M. Carey Thomas, who said "Eliot disgraced himself." Patricia Palmieri, a Harvard alum who teaches at the College of Staten Island and Columbia University's Teachers College, saw parallels. Summers's talk "sounds new, but in reality it is just a rehash of the old biological inferiority theories that were trotted out during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era," she wrote in an e-mail.

OFF POINT College students living at home or in off-campus apartments may get a reprieve from a new state law requiring meningitis vaccinations, under an amendment proposed by Senator John A. Hart Jr., a South Boston Democrat. The legislation passed last year requires vaccinations for all new students at Massachusetts campuses that offer housing beginning next fall, but some critics say the law is too broad, because the $50 vaccination has only been proven effective against the strains of meningitis that thrive in group settings like dorms. Dr. Thomas Sterne, a member of the state's Public Health Council, called the law "well intentioned but ill-directed. . . . There are thousands of kids commuting to school who aren't going to benefit." Hart's amendment would limit the requirement to students in dorms. A 24-year-old commuter student at Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy died of bacterial meningitis earlier this month.

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