Leftie Tolerance
Elite university faculty, brilliant academics with a leftist committment to diversity, would surely have both the aptitude and the desire to react with dispassionate open-mindedness to controversial ideas, right?
From NYT:
Bowing to pressure from his faculty, the president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers, on Thursday released a month-old transcript of his contentious closed-door remarks about the shortage of women in the sciences and engineering. The transcript revealed several provocative statements by Dr. Summers about the "intrinsic aptitude" of women, the career pressures they face and discrimination within universities.
Dr. Summers's remarks, which have only been described by others until now, have fueled a widening crisis on campus, with several professors talking about taking a vote of no confidence on the president next week. That idea alone is unprecedented at Harvard in modern times.
According to another article:
Nancy Hopkins, a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who once led an investigation of gender discrimination there that led to reforms in hiring and promotion, walked out midway through Summers' remarks.
``When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn't breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill,'' Hopkins said Monday.
Open-mindedness is only a virtue within the constraints of whatever orthodoxy prevails over a given institution. At Bob Jones University, biologists are not allowed to speculate about evolution; at Harvard, they aren't allowed to speculate about gender.
2 Comments:
The transcript of Summer's comments can be found here. His opening sentence specifically describes it as an "attempt at provocation", an attempt to spur discussion.
The resulting furor is simply proof of something I've frequently pointed out: that tolerance is not inherently a characteristic of either the political left or the political right, but a principle which is separate from whatever doctrine or group it may be applied to or invoked by on any given day.
I heard the Hopkins interview on NPR, and I simply burst out laughing. Either she's breathlessly and hypocritically exaggerating her reaction in a grab for sympathetic attention, or she is the very living embodiment of the fragile, "hysterical", neurotic female of Victorian stereotype. She reminds me of the character E.F. Taupe in Robert Grudin's satirical Book: a novel, who accuses an unpopular academic colleague's novel of psychically "raping" her by expressing ideas she doesn't like and doesn't want to think about.
I'm going to have to be the voice of disagreement here, because I can actually see where those outraged are coming from.
I understand that he's trying to be "provocative
", but I'm not certain how he expected people to react when he is, in essence, saying that, "Hey, maybe the reason why minorities don't go to the best schools or occupy the best job positions is because they are intrinsically inferior?" Especially when the evidence he's using to support this hypothesis are self-admittedly spotty at best.
His reasoning is akin to someone saying, "Hey, what if the reason why so many blacks are in prison is because they are naturally inclined towards crime and violence?" Or "Hey, what if the reason why so many South American economies have collapsed is because those hispanics just don't have an intrinsic aptitude for handling money."
Let's face it, his statements didn't spur outrage because they were daring or revolutionary in this age of polital correctness. Rather, it's because they were the same tired rationalisations that created discrimination in the first place.
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