Chill sets in at Harvard
When I made a rare trip yesterday into the deepest, darkest depths of Cambridge, a place where most rational people rarely dare to go, I fully expected that Harvard Square had been reduced to a smoldering mass of burned-out buildings.
The world as we know it had ended, right? Reason had been kicked on its side. I mean, the president of Harvard University dared to say something that wasn't completely beaten with a boring stick, pasteurized, then homogenized, vetted through nine various committees to assure that his words didn't carry a scintilla of interesting thought.
But, no, everything was fine. The only thing that was different were all the women grumbling about their male oppressors, but maybe that wasn't anything different at all.
Poor Larry Summers. I mean that in all sincerity. When he raises a somewhat delicate question that was begging to be asked before a group of supposedly brilliant people last week, he ends up being portrayed as a crimson-tinted Jimmy the Greek, prejudiced to his immoral core.
Because that's what it's come to in the knee-jerk America of the 21st century, even within institutions that are expected to foster the freewheeling exchange and thoughtful analysis of controversial ideas: Don't ever, under any circumstances, stray across the razor wire of political correctness. Those who do end up shredded into bloodied little bits.
What did Summers do? He addressed the obvious, that women have a harder time achieving success in math and science careers than men. And he posed a thorny question: Are women somehow innately, meaning biologically, inferior to men in these fields?
He wrapped this question in a blanket of caveats: that more research needed to be done, that it wasn't his own hypothesis, that his intention was to be provocative, and that he hoped to be proven wrong. He also sandwiched this hypothesis in two distinctly different takes: that women, facing myriad family pressures, are placed at a societal disadvantage because of the long hours required for success and because they confront discrimination that men don't.
Didn't matter. One distinguished MIT professor shut down her laptop and walked out in the middle of his talk, telling the Globe that if she stayed, she might have ''either blacked out or vomited." A university dean described Summers's remarks as ''an intellectual tsunami."
To the former I'd recommend medical treatment, to the latter a little bit of tact.
It's been more than 20 years since I roamed a college campus, but I've always assumed that the strength of the academy is its ability to encourage difficult questions, to synthesize unconventional thought, rather than rant over it.
No longer does that seem to be the case, at least in Cambridge.
It's important to note that in the initial Globe story on the remarks and resulting furor, reporter Marcella Bombardieri exhaustively talked to 10 attendees, four of whom said they were not offended by Summers's remarks.
But a central tenet of political correctness is that those who shout the loudest get the most attention, which is what's been going on. The result is that Summers, not by nature a particularly penitent human being, has offered a new apology just about every day this week.
All of which creates a sorry state of affairs at Harvard, one that will undoubtedly spill over to other campuses across the nation. Our most brilliant educators will feel the need to appease instead of prod. They will be required to think within conventions rather than probe at fresh and controversial ground. They will have the inherent understanding that to deviate from popular thought is to risk destroying their own careers. In Cambridge, we'll be left with a vanilla-flavored university president.
And what of the initial question of whether women do or don't have the same innate ability as men in the sciences and math? Most certainly they do, but we'll never conclusively know, because now we're not allowed to ask.
Brian McGrory is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at mcgrory@globe.com.
