Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Harvard Opens Up

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It took 371 years but women are finally on top in public, as well as in private, at Harvard. The University has named respected historian Drew Gilpin Faust, Radcliffe’s current head, as its new President.

Faust said in welcome remarks:

We have dedicated ourselves as well to a dramatic expansion of access to Harvard’s academic community – at every level: with the undergraduate low-income initiative, with the commitment to bring women and minorities into science and into the professoriate more broadly, and with our efforts to make the professional schools more affordable. I hope that my own appointment can be one symbol of an opening of opportunities that would have been inconceivable even a generation ago.

Faust’s appointment is an exclamation point at the end of the tortured tenure of Larry Summers, who punched his own exit ticket by offering as his “best guess” that “issues of intrinsic aptitude” were responsible for “variability of aptitude” between women and men in “the special case of science and engineering.”

We all benefit when the doors of opportunity are opened. Harvard should be congratulated for its distinguished appointment, and for putting its history of prejudice against women in the rear view mirror. Faust should be congratulated for hitting the right note from the start.

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  1. In the first paragraph of his speech, Larry Summers  identified these under representations as well:

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    “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. These are all phenomena in which one observes underrepresentation, and I think it’s important to try to think systematically and clinically about the reasons for underrepresentation. “

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    quite a guy.

    • Black people are taller than white people and they hate the cold. 

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      I just clinically and systematically explained Basketball AND hockey.  Gotta love Jason Kidd  and Jarome Iginla.

  2. …So Harvard got rid of its male president, the idiot male Summers–although they didn’t really, since the idiot Summers is still among the professoriate in the “economics” brigade–and they install a female president. 

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    I know nothing about the soon-to-be-installed female president, but let’s understand something.  The only job of the president of a university in the USofA–particularly a private university–is fund-raising.  Harvard jettisoned Summers as president after it had become obvious that he would be detrimental to fund-raising.  And, Harvard decided to install a female as president because–voila!–he had dissed females, which led to his being jettisoned as president.

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    I’m sorry, but all of this is a joke.  If Larry Summers had dissed midget males who hop around on one leg, Harvard would have tried to find a midget male who hops around on one leg as its president.

    • ….that is some hefty cynicism.  A woman is going to be president of Harvard University for cryin out loud.  It is a big deal.  Literally historic.  I for one am gonna take the glass for half full (and then some) on this one.

      • …why it took Hahvahd so long to have a female fund raiser/cheerleader is beyond my information. 

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        Stanford had one for a few years–her name was Condi Rice.  See what that got us?  But Stanford had a “twofer” and I’m sure you know the reference.

  3. Bob, I’d suggest your truncating of Summers’ remarks cast them in the worst light possible, though you did provide the link, to your credit. 

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    The ill-informed comments on your post show why lots of the Left stood up for him, from Harvard undergrads (who supported him 3-to-1) to the Washington Post editorial board etc etc. 

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    Here is what Summers said, in case a reader wants to judge for him or herself on whether he should have been ousted.

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    The most controversial in a way, question, and the most difficult question to judge, is what is the role of discrimination?  To what extent is there overt discrimination?  Surely there is some.

    Much more tellingly, to what extent are there pervasive patterns of passive discrimination and stereotyping in which people like to choose people like themselves, and the people in the previous group are disproportionately white male, and so they choose people who are like themselves, who are disproportionately white male.  No one who’s been in a university department or who has been involved in personnel processes can deny that this kind of taste does go on, and it is something that happens, and it is something that absolutely, vigorously needs to be combated.

    On the other hand, I think before regarding it as pervasive, and as the dominant explanation of the patterns we observe, there are two points that should make one hesitate.

    The first is the fallacy of composition. No doubt it is true that if any one institution makes a major effort to focus on reducing stereotyping, on achieving diversity, on hiring more people, no doubt it can succeed in hiring more. But each person it hires will come from a different institution, and so everyone observes that when an institution works very hard at this, to some extent they are able to produce better results. If I stand up at a football game and everybody else is sitting down, I can see much better, but if everybody stands up, the views may get a little better, but they don’t get a lot better.

    And there’s a real question as to how plausible it is to believe that there is anything like half as many people who are qualified to be scientists at top ten schools and who are now not at top ten schools, and that’s the argument that one has to make in thinking about this as a national problem rather than an individual institutional problem.

    The second problem is the one that Gary Becker very powerfully pointed out in addressing racial discrimination many years ago. If it was really the case that everybody was discriminating, there would be very substantial opportunities for a limited number of people who were not prepared to discriminate to assemble remarkable departments of high quality people at relatively limited cost simply by the act of their not discriminating, because of what it would mean for the pool that was available.

    And there are certainly examples of institutions that have focused on increasing their diversity to their substantial benefit, but if there was really a pervasive pattern of discrimination that was leaving an extraordinary number of high-quality potential candidates behind, one suspects that in the highly competitive academic marketplace, there would be more examples of institutions that succeeded substantially by working to fill the gap. And I think one sees relatively little evidence of that.

    So my best guess, to provoke you, of what’s behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people’s legitimate family desires and employers’ current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.

    I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong, because I would like nothing better than for these problems to be addressable simply by everybody understanding what they are, and working very hard to address them.

    • he had to resign. As I recall, he was in and out of hot water pretty much every year for some “bull in the china shop” type incident (like the African American studies thing). I would also note that Harvard differs from other American universities in that it has a massive endowment and such a lofty reputation that the money veritably flows in of its own accord (OK, slight exaggeration, but it’s not your typical college that has to beg constantly).

  4. Summers was removed by Harvard and his comments regarding women were just the last straw.  He had alienated the faculty, alum, and friends in his pursuit to be right in everything.  He was combative and made enemies whereever he has worked. 

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