I attended the AEI conference on women and science that Christina Hoff Sommers talks about in the WSJ article that George linked to earlier today. The debate was lively, intelligent, and civil. It’s simply astounding to contrast the conference with Harvard’s (and more recently, the University of California, Davis’s) treatment of Lawrence Summers. In one circumstance, leading experts came together for an important discussion of biological differences between the sexes. In the other circumstance, the president of a prestigious university was fired for merely bringing up the possibility of biological differences between the sexes. Which one of those sounds like a good standard for academia?