Jonah, I’ve now read the transcript of the Summers talk,
although not yet the Q & A. I agree with you that the campaign against
Summers is an outrageous inquisition. Summers’s talk is very
thoughtful. It makes a perfectly reasonable case that biology might play
a role in career choice. Summers has been attacked for using the weak
anecdotal example of his daughters’ reaction to toy trucks, but he in
fact invokes a number of important arguments for a biological role in sex
differences¬the Israeli kibbutz experience, separated twin studies, our
changing views on the causes of autism, and divergent career outcomes in
spite of a growing pool of women with graduate educations in mathematics
and engineering. All of these arguments can be challenged, and Summers’s
admits that. But if it is illegitimate even to put this sort of argument
forward, then free speech at Harvard is a thing of the past.
Something else emerges from these transcripts that I think helps
to explain this whole flap. I don’t doubt that those who are complaining
about Summers are infuriated at biological explanations. But it’s pretty
clear from this transcript that their deeper goal is to get rid of
Summers because he is asking too many uncomfortable questions about the
way affirmative action works. In this talk, Summers calls for research
on whether affirmative action does what it claims to do. Do diversity
searches really find top quality professors who were only being
overlooked because they are minorities, or do these searches only yield
professors of middling or low quality? Summers also points out
contradictions in what diversity advocates are asking for. Some of them
want faculty picked on purely objective criteria like number of papers
published. This will supposedly eliminate subtle hiring
discrimination. But other diversity advocates want the opposite. They
call for choosing minority candidates based on subjective considerations
like potential and collegiality, supposedly to overcome the
discrimination built into “objective” criteria. Summers asks, which is
it? He also wants data to back up the choice of strategy.
So in this talk, Summers is subtly but clearly exposing the
contradictions and secrets of the campus diversity industry. By calling
for objective proof that diversity searches really produce faculty equal
in quality to color blind or sex blind searches, Summers is laying out a
standard that he knows diversity proponents can’t meet. And the
contradictory criteria thrown up by diversity advocates are just
different ways of getting to the numbers they want. By calling for
objective studies of which strategy actually works, Summers is exposing
the failings and contradictions of the whole diversity enterprise. I
think this is the deeper reason why Summers is in trouble. His
pro-affirmative action opponents can’t openly condemn him for asking
these questions, so they’ve focused on the biology issue instead.