Summers did not contend that one gender is smarter. He postulated the two genders as intellectually different. Is that no longer sayable in the groves of academe? Does the inquiring mind now find itself fenced out? An avalanche of data point in that direction; anyone with his (or her) eyes open knows it - and vive la difference!
Is it sexist even to suggest complementary gray matter on the part of the genders? Can the data not even be discussed for fear of what feminist termagants might say in the faculty lounges? If men and women differ in, say, upper-body strength, might they not differ in their brains as well? If genetic predisposition to the arts and humanities (women) and to math and the hard sciences (men) is such a misguided proposition it is not even discussable, then what of discussions about affectional preference versus genetic predisposition among some toward homosexual behaviors?
If we all are equal in rights, are both genders and all races equal in abilities as well? Do we move, now, to the insertion of equal numbers of women as men on the front lines - and to the elimination of gender-specific sports?
What of the field of behavioral genetics? Are the great debates - nature versus nurture, biology versus society - now over, with nurture and society declared the victors? Is there no "intrinsic aptitude"? Do innate differences not exist? Given the Harvard contretemps, do women no longer rule?
XXX
In undergraduate school, this correspondent almost got booted out for writing in the college daily that the university bought a professor's tenure - paid him to leave because he did not conform to the nearly unanimous campus ideology. Rather, the provost insisted, the man had been difficult, impossible to get along with and not worth the cost of keeping around.
In graduate school, this correspondent studied under a professor of overwhelming intellectual power (Leo Strauss), subsequently disparaged - perhaps never so much as now - as the mastermind of a cabal into which this correspondent is thus lumped and thus targeted, with hardly more than a scintilla of irony, for intellectual extinction.
And so we come back to the humbling of Larry Summers by Harvard's viragos of virtue - aided, perhaps uninvited, by their ideological consorts holding down the presidencies of, e.g., Stanford, Princeton and MIT. Since one's collegiate days, intellectual snobbery and elitism - and ideological unanimity - have grown only worse. Chicago's late Allan Bloom wrote famously about it in his "Closing of the American Mind." But then, why would one expect different behaviors and diminished uniformity of attitudes at an institution such as Harvard with an endowment of, oh, a mere $22 billion?