Good Old Larry
Ten points for anyone who figured out what the aforeposted "Racial Inequalities in Academia" was parodying. I "find'n'replaced" from Larry Summers's ign'rint and grammatically unsound remarks about women in science. There is some backstory to this.
Ahem.
When I learned that L-Dawg was being evicted from his comfy chair, my first reaction was to cringe and think, "Oh, that's a bit much. Now we'll look all PC-police, and it wasn't so bad, really, blah blah blah." A sentiment which I have since heard from many people.
But then I decided to do a little experiment and pretend Lars was talking about race rather than sex and see if it still sounded defensible. I kinda don't think it did. But read for yourselves and see.
As for the "it's not society, it's science" argument for sex differences in scientific ability, my Inner Boomy cries out that 100 years ago there was scientific evidence for innate racial intellectual disparities. (Or less than 100 - see The Bell Curve.)
To sum up what I think were Lazza's main points (after wading through the tortuous prose of his speech):
1) Probably most women don't want to make the sacrifices that are necessary for being a successful academic scientist. This might be because it's an inhuman task and because women are expected to pick up the slack in the traditional family model - but it might just be because girls like babies and cuddly bunnies.
2) Probably the other reason there are not tons of tenured women at Harvard or MIT is because there are more really really really really clever men than there are women. Even though populations of men and women might be of comparable smartness, there is more of a range of variability in men's brains when it comes to tricky things like math. Ergo, more male math geniuses. That's just science! We can never expect there to be as many genius women as there are men, so it makes sense to have more men professors (brilliant but odd) and more women secretaries (competent but mediocre).
3) Oh, there might be some institutionalized descrimination. But I'm not sure. Anyway, we don't mean anything bad by it. And besides, there's been plenty of time since Betty Friedan for universities to gorge themselves on highly qualified female/minority facutly at a discount rate (bargain basement prices for unwanted commodities!) thereby getting a leg up on the competition (who insist on hiring expensive males). But since I don't see that happening, there must just not be a pool of discount female faculty to take advantage of, which underscores propostions 1 and 2. It's all economics!
Capice?
Ahem.
When I learned that L-Dawg was being evicted from his comfy chair, my first reaction was to cringe and think, "Oh, that's a bit much. Now we'll look all PC-police, and it wasn't so bad, really, blah blah blah." A sentiment which I have since heard from many people.
But then I decided to do a little experiment and pretend Lars was talking about race rather than sex and see if it still sounded defensible. I kinda don't think it did. But read for yourselves and see.
As for the "it's not society, it's science" argument for sex differences in scientific ability, my Inner Boomy cries out that 100 years ago there was scientific evidence for innate racial intellectual disparities. (Or less than 100 - see The Bell Curve.)
To sum up what I think were Lazza's main points (after wading through the tortuous prose of his speech):
1) Probably most women don't want to make the sacrifices that are necessary for being a successful academic scientist. This might be because it's an inhuman task and because women are expected to pick up the slack in the traditional family model - but it might just be because girls like babies and cuddly bunnies.
2) Probably the other reason there are not tons of tenured women at Harvard or MIT is because there are more really really really really clever men than there are women. Even though populations of men and women might be of comparable smartness, there is more of a range of variability in men's brains when it comes to tricky things like math. Ergo, more male math geniuses. That's just science! We can never expect there to be as many genius women as there are men, so it makes sense to have more men professors (brilliant but odd) and more women secretaries (competent but mediocre).
3) Oh, there might be some institutionalized descrimination. But I'm not sure. Anyway, we don't mean anything bad by it. And besides, there's been plenty of time since Betty Friedan for universities to gorge themselves on highly qualified female/minority facutly at a discount rate (bargain basement prices for unwanted commodities!) thereby getting a leg up on the competition (who insist on hiring expensive males). But since I don't see that happening, there must just not be a pool of discount female faculty to take advantage of, which underscores propostions 1 and 2. It's all economics!
Capice?
posted by Joolya at
3:26 PM
5 Comments:
Hurrah, Joolya!
I also especially love Larry's comments about Jews and agriculture, a topic he seems weirdly obsessed with:
1. "To take a set of diverse examples, the data will, I am confident, reveal that Catholics are substantially underrepresented in investment banking, which is an enormously high-paying profession in our society; that white men are very substantially underrepresented in the National Basketball Association; and that Jews are very substantially underrepresented in farming and in agriculture."
WTF?
and
2. "I just returned from Israel, where we had the opportunity to visit a kibbutz, and to spend some time talking about the history of the kibbutz movement, and it is really very striking to hear how the movement started with an absolute commitment, of a kind one doesn't encounter in other places, that everybody was going to do the same jobs. Sometimes the women were going to fix the tractors, and the men were going to work in the nurseries, sometimes the men were going to fix the tractors and the women were going to work in the nurseries, and just under the pressure of what everyone wanted, in a hundred different kibbutzes, each one of which evolved, it all moved in the same direction"
Double WTF-- what does that have to do with ANYTHING?
Though certain individuals on the right would certainly have us believe otherwise, there is no way in hell that Larry Summers got the axe because of his comments about women and science. Disparaging women's abilities is a time-honored Harvard tradition. As I understand it, he got the axe because he was an inept administrator, couldn't raise enough money, and couldn't strongarm the faculty in to anything--moving certain departments out of Cambridge, changing the undergraduate curriculum, and so on, because he chose to spend his capital pissing the faculty off about other, off-topic things to make a show of how right he could be. Drive away the high-profile public intellectual with ridiculously popular courses, because, why, exactly? Sound off at a Native American conference about how the European settlers didn't mean to wipe out the Native Americans? Tell the education school grads that teaching is a waste of a Harvard degree? Tell the dean of arts and sciences of your liberal arts university that “ in general, economists are smarter than political scientists, and political scientists are smarter than sociologists?”
I mean, sure, you can, but It's just not the way for the head of a high profile university to behave if you plan to get anything done.
The women comments make for a great red herring though, because it signals the "PC police" flare, and we all get confused and drawn in to culture-wars battles, while the Harvard corporation makes a pragmatic, financially-driven decision.
Some of my other favorite Larry Summers quotes:
http://www.forces.org/evidence/who/files/wb.htm
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=511399
Yeah, you've got to be tactful to be a public person, because otherwise you piss people off and they want to attack you or are unhelpful. This is why diplomatic speech is so veiled and multivalent. Some conservatives forget about this and are wankers, and then they try to get people to do things and realise that they can't. When people with enormous wealth and power, like Harvard or American presidents, feel that the normal rules don't apply to them because they have such big guns and/or endowments they sometimes don't notice that they're pissing everyone off and that it's going to make things harder in the future. Or they do know, and they don't care, because it's all about having a "muscular" policy and dominating the field of debate. This style of politics has been shown to be shit and counterproductive by recent events, hasn't it.
By the way, there was a very interesting article today about inherent gayness by Peter Tatchell in the Guardian.
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/peter_tatchell/2006/06/born_gay_or_made_gay.html
This has nothing to do with your posts, other than the old nature/nurture debate, but I think it shows how someone can write a considered and careful account of a complex and highly politically-charged issue. Unlike dear Larry.
Joolya, I just reread your lit crit of Larry's speech, and I just wanted to say that it's devastating. You are fantastic! And hilarious!
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