The frenzied reaction to Lawrence Summers’ remarks about women
in math and science exposes secular Harvard as more cultish and
dogmatic than the religious college it replaced. Intellectuals who
pat themselves on the back for appreciating Arthur Miller’s play
The Crucible are subjecting Summers to the crucible of
political correctness, an admixture of ideological acids that burns
through any intellectual who dares touch it.
Summers can’t “lead” anymore, they say. What does this mean? It
means that he’s proven himself to be an unreliable high priest to
their cultish claims, one of which is that no differences exist
between the sexes. It means that he forgot that his principal job
is to fortify the politically correct prejudices of his faculty. It
means that fearlessly seeking the truth is the last quality
Harvard’s professors wish to see in their leader.
University presidents, it is assumed now, should operate like
pandering pols, not scholars, and the moment they deviate from that
expectation the infantile professors who form their constituency
are entitled to eat them alive. Read the transcripts of Summers’
remarks and what’s striking about them is not that they are
provocative but that they are essentially timid and innocuous. Even
the most tentative bow to common sense in his speech was prefaced
by a tone of apology, a pledge of more “diversity” drives, and
hedges and qualifications of the
I-wish-what-I’m-about-to-hypothesize-wasn’t-true variety.
Yet even this minor, ginger step toward free inquiry is deemed
terribly impolitic. And for this transgression, Summers has had to
confess repeatedly to wrongs he didn’t even commit. And no
punishment short of expulsion from the Harvard presidency can
repair the damage he didn’t do.
The raw politics of it all would be scarcely believable were it
not a farcical repeat of so much recent academic history. Time and
again, the post-1960s university has chosen politics over truth,
“equality” (which, let’s face it, means hiring incompetents to
teach illiterates) over academic excellence, and petulant
professors over students seeking a real education.
Students always come last in these controversies. Whether they
get a good education is irrelevant to tussling academics. In fact,
faculty ideologues would prefer students not receive any deep,
comprehensive knowledge from the curriculum as that makes them more
difficult to manipulate.
To see how fundamentally uninterested they are in the academic
welfare of students, look at the endless energy faculty ideologues
spend on “diversity” demands, a blatantly political, not academic,
goal. Does a student’s grasp of math and science depend on the sex
of the teacher? Can a student only compute after exposure to an
equal number of male and female teachers? One might think so from
their insistence on diversity. But obviously learning doesn’t
depend on the sex of the teacher; it depends on the knowledge of
the teacher.
Consequently, a teaching staff can be largely male or largely
female without any harm to students. If every female teaching
candidate Harvard interviewed were like Marie Curie, Harvard could
hire them all and have 100% female representation. Would that be
“diverse”? No, but it would guarantee that Harvard students
received brilliant instruction. Similarly, if every candidate were
like Albert Einstein, Harvard could hire all male mathematicians
and serve its students.
Nonstop calls for diversity are evidence of a politicized
faculty that couldn’t care less about students save as vessels for
their politics. A high percentage of male mathematicians isn’t an
academic problem — students won’t learn less as a result — it is
just a political problem for ideologues who wish to bend reality to
their will. This ideology isn’t rational enough to be called
religion; it is more like a cult. And since its claims aren’t
founded on reality but sheer willfulness and caprice, it can’t
persuade those who reject them by showing them that their evidence
is wrong; it can only force them into agreement through political
pressure and by banishing anyone who calls the superstitions into
question.
Faculty ideologues are like crooked judges who end trials before
all the evidence has been heard lest they not get the verdict they
want. Lawrence Summers stands in the dock of such a show trial. The
trial began in Cambridge, but Harvard’s faculty should conclude it
in Salem.
