E-Mail This Article to a Friend FREEDOM WATCH The Summers transcript doesn’t lie BY HARVEY SILVERGLATE AND DAN POULSON

The last time we discussed the politically charged soap opera unfolding at Harvard, President Lawrence H. Summers was being crucified by a faculty cabal for daring to raise the uncomfortable possibility that biological and genetic differences might help account for the dearth of female faculty in the academic sciences (see "Say It Ain’t So," News and Features, January 28). The media, led by the Boston Globe and its parent company, the New York Times, were rooting for the mob, boldly predicting that a no-confidence vote by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences would signal the end of Summers’s young presidency. Rather than stand his ground, Summers offered endless apologies, helplessly believing this approach would somehow dispel the ludicrous objections of his critics, who couldn’t bear the image of a university president doing the unthinkable: asking provocative and politically incorrect questions on hot-button issues implicating gender politics. The inmates, we suggested, were running the asylum.

But you can’t have a good soap opera without a wild card, and in this case, that would be the actual transcript of Summers’s January 14 talk. For the past month, Summers’s refusal to release the transcript fueled speculation about exactly what he said. If, as he claimed, the talk was a strictly exploratory discussion about women’s under-representation in advanced positions in the sciences, then he had no reason to fear releasing the transcript. On the other hand, if he had voiced a personal belief in women’s genetic inferiority in science, he had an obvious interest in suppression. Under pressure, Summers last week released the transcript and it disproves much of what his accusers claim he said — and goes a long way toward clarifying his attitude and the intellectual substance of his opinions.

What first raised the hackles of Summers’s critics were the rankings he offered of possible explanations for women’s under-representation in the sciences. As was widely reported, Summers ranked them as 1) social factors involving the bearing and raising of children, 2) possible biological and genetic differences between men and women that accounted for different aptitudes, and 3) discrimination in the hiring process. Some critics were especially appalled that Summers ranked genetic variation as likely more important than gender bias in accounting for the fact that, as a group, the men’s test scores in math and science are more widely distributed than those of women. The transcript confirms all this, but it also reveals something his critics neglected to mention: Summers’s commitment to alleviating the social factors that discourage women from applying for prominent jobs in academic science.

Summers begins with the revolutionary idea (for a university administrator) that universities should work harder to accommodate those women (and few men) who find that academia’s 80-hour work weeks make raising children impossible. "Issues around child care, issues around extending tenure clocks, issues around providing family benefits, are enormously important," he says. He mentions that Harvard faculty members with kids in college get, through an interest-free loan, a subsidy of about $9000 — but points out that "if you have a six-year-old, we give you nothing." With regard to eliminating gender discrimination in the faculty-hiring process, Summers is equally forthright: searches for candidates for faculty positions, he says, have to be done carefully in order to avoid "that pattern of choosing people like yourself." Badly conceived faculty searches, he also says, run the risk that people hired for their talents are "made to feel or ... [are] being seen by others as having been hired for some other reason." Above all, he argues, female faculty should be reassured that they’ve been hired for their minds, rather than to meet gender quotas.

Summers indicates from the beginning that he doesn’t want to give "an institutional talk about Harvard’s policies toward diversity," but rather to deliver "some attempts at provocation." That, in part, explains why the speech was given off the record; had it not been, his comments wouldn’t have been as extraordinarily free-ranging and frank. He dared to venture into the thickets of academic gender politics and focus his audience on the need to determine real facts and real causes in order to devise real solutions.

Harvard economics professor Edward L. Glaeser, writing an op-ed on February 18 in the Harvard Crimson, sums up the Summers controversy as a conflict over two opposing visions of a university president: "a pleasant figurehead who presides over a growing endowment and speaks donation-related platitudes" versus "an active intellectual, someone who participates fully in the scholarly life, engages in academic debates, and sometimes even throws out hypotheses that are wrong." The latter model, concludes Glaeser, is better than "a fund-raising bureaucrat who protects himself from error by avoiding intellectual discourse."

This is the central point in the controversy. Summers’s critics piled on because he spoke frankly on a topic in which certain points of view had long ago been ruled off-limits by a highly politicized arts-and-sciences faculty accustomed to running the show and establishing the orthodoxies. Whether Summers has the guts to continue the search for truth and for real solutions remains to be seen. It all depends on whether he can regain his footing and stop apologizing for being what university presidents should be, but rarely are.