I may get pilloried for saying this, but I kind of like having Larry Summers around. He’s useful, kind of like the Fool in King Lear, who gets to say the most outrageous and provocative things to the King without fear of reprisal.
Now, as we can read for ourselves , Summers wasn’t just being provocative. His remarks were jaw-droppingly foolish and hurtful.
Was Harvard expecting a King when they hired him? You know, wise, sage, decorous, a cash rainmaker. Hard to imagine: Summers has a long history of abrasiveness and bull-in-china-shop behavior. His idea of a pleasant discussion is most people’s idea of an intellectual knife-fight.
The pushback we’ve been seeing is a proper and correct reaction. But even better would be some institutional and personal soul-searching, to uncover conscious and unconscious prejudices in the micro-cultures of science and academia, right down to the lab level. Sexist attitudes and behaviors still exist, and they’re often not subtle at all. Prejudice is a very tough problem to combat: it’s as if it’s in the air we breathe, and seems to get into our bloodstreams without us consciously knowing.
My point is this: Larry Summers himself is not that important. Theshort-term PR hit that Harvard is taking is not that important. Let’s keep our eyes on the prize: We are missing female brains in the highest echelons of science.
Meghan O’Rourke of Slate has a good article here,dealing quite a bit with biases in various fields. She feels thatHarvard’s decidedly mixed record on gender fairness makes Summers’remarks that much worse. But what if Summers were more facile andslick? Would we be having this discussion?
The problem existed before Larry Summers came to Harvard. but tothe extent that he — in his klutzy, boorish, and ignorant way — has brought it to the fore, maybe it’s good to havethe Fool around.
