Diversity

Horace,
I’m still struggling to comprehend the Diversity Statement’s prohibition of “words, actions, and behaviours that… threaten infliction of… emotional harm.” Whatever unspeakable things that might conceivably cover, they’re definitely not permitted. But then I’m also having difficulty with the belief, implied by Professor Stanton, that there are ratios of women and men that “ought” to be found in any given sphere of employment.

They have a dream…

“Diversity” (n)
1. The manipulation of an institutions’ selection process by left wing idealogues to prevent merit being used as a selection criterion.
2. The institution of a system of political cronyism disguised as “fairness”
3. Revenge against groups that the left hates esp. white men and right-wingers.
4. A way of frightening opponents of socialism into silence by redefining words so that any opposition to socialist policies appears morally evil.

I find it interesting that political conservatives in the United States are complaining about a lack of diversity of the political support on university campuses. (Have I detected an echo of that here from time to time?) But, as has been pointed out here, the concern is only with some departments and not others. See: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050404/jacoby
The world isn’t becoming more diverse. It has always been diverse. But we are all closer to each other as information flows more rapidly and in exponentially increasing amounts. One can be culture-shocked living in a cave these days, so long as one has access to the Internet.
Now, as for Mr. Summers, must I invite him to supper at the risk of losing my well-deserved reputation for open-mindedness? Why not spend a little time on this far more significant case:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/09/14/state/n180613D10.DTL
But, all this being said, I find speech codes to be stultifying, if well-intended. I asked the firs’-years in my Anthro section this term simply to show respect for each other–but let everyone know that they would be discussing controversial issues of the day. Surely that should be enough.

“lack of diversity of the political support on university campuses”
Dr Dawg,
from cnsnews.com
“Faculty members from Harvard University led the way in overall political contributions — $266,044 — with 81 percent of those gifts going to Democrats so far in 2007, according to the report”.
This is the kind of “diversity” we are talking about. The drive to be diverse is leading to this kind of skewing of the political landscape of colleges (and the media “Journalists give to Democrats 9-1”).
I find such stats frightening. It seems to me that “diversity” is actually leading to anything but diversity by closing down speech and effectively barring anyone with dissenting views.

Dr Dawg,
“As for Mr. Summers, must I invite him to supper at the risk of losing my well-deserved reputation for open-mindedness?”
No-one suggested you should. That’s not the point. Stanton’s preposterous gasping at the very suggestion is nearer the issue, as is her tacit assumption of male to female ratios that “ought” to exist in, for instance, mathematics and engineering.

“However hard you try, your political views will be a part of that discussion and without teachers with different views to balance the curriculum, your students will be propagandised – not educated.”
I suggest before judging the quality of my pedagogy, you inquire a little further. I actually say very little–just ask questions now and then.The point is to get people of quite diverse views talking to each other, not listening to me drone on. Maybe that’s why my attendance seems to be good and stable.

David:
Not being a fan, to put it mildly, of sociobiology, I think Summer’s comments were pretty out-of-whack in this day and age. I wouldn’t expect geographers to invite flat-earthers to speak at their dinners either. Occam’s Razor tells me (if razors can speak) that plain old sexist assumptions and systemic discrimination have been keeping women out of “male” disciplines. In Canada, I am happy to report that enrollment in engineering is now approaching gender parity–so much for women’s “innate” inabilities.
Didn’t Mr. Summers allow his name to be connected to this statement when he was an economist at the World Bank?
“The measurement of the costs of health-impairing pollution depends on the forgone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.”

David,
Maybe I’m *not* better than that. 🙂 Summers, if his reported comment about women is accurate, is intellectually lazy at best.
I don’t have a problem with the notion of “innate ability,” only with the idea that’s it’s unequally distributed by gender and “race.” Such allegations have often been made, inevitably on the right of the political spectrum, but I do not find them supported by much evidence.

“Perhaps we should demand that corporate boardrooms include more Democrats, given that that’s where the real power lies”
Then buy some shares and you’ll get to vote on who is the board. The difference with education is that being state funded, I am being forced to “buy shares” and then given no voice…quite aside from the fact that business is not in the business of indoctrinating young people (most businesses are actually about doing business).
“You give us one Pentagon, one Department of State, Justice and Education, plus throw in the Supreme Court…”
The idea that Govt departments, bound by precisely the diversity crap that we are discussing, are somehow biased to the right is patent nonsense. There is certainly not an 81% bias of politocal donations to the republicans. My understanding is that the Supreme court is 5/4 right/left and has rotated more or less around that ratio for sveral decades.
The institutions you name DO NOT have the kind of bias that most universities have. They also DO NOT have hiring policies designed to ACTIVELY PREVENT leftards from getting jobs in the way that the ethos that Stanton and her ilk espouse actively prevents academics who do not subscribe to her groupthink.
This is precisely what we are arguing, Stantons “offence” is exactly the kind of tactic that would put off people with different views from applying, nevermind getting through the selection proceedure. How “welcoming” do you think UC looks to anyone whos views might differ from Stanton?
However much you try to keep your politics out of the classroom, the fact that 80% of the faculty are liberal produces an echo chamber of group think. Just as it would if the faculty were 80% conservative.

“How “welcoming” do you think UC looks to anyone whos views might differ from Stanton?”
Well, I dunno. About as welcoming as the University of Western Ontario, which houses racialist Phillippe Rushton? About as welcoming as Carleton University, home of one of Canada’s most prominent global warming deniers?
My point being that we’re dealing with *universities* here. Does Stanton not a have a right to state her beliefs openly? We’re talking a *dinner* here, for goodness sake, nothing more.
David:
Summers said nothing about “race.” I was merely noting that differing degrees of success are too often attributed to innate characteristics, not of individuals, but of non-dominant groups, by those who don’t want to face up to the simpler hypothesis that discrimination is the likely culprit. Summers made a lazy and indefensible claim about women and certain “hard” disciplines. He included engineering. Women’s enrollment in engineering is busy belying his hypothesis as the same time as he makes it. Back in the 1960s, the psychologist Donald Hebb at McGill stated that women were rare in university faculties because “McGill is a research-oriented university.” That fellow, God rest his soul, is now asleep with the mastodons, but Summers is around to let us know that this sort of thinking is far from dead.

Sorry, Dawg, while I was typing with my elbow, you had already answered the question. You said: “I don’t have a problem with the notion of ‘innate ability,’ only with the idea that it’s unequally distributed by gender.”
Is the ability to bench press 550 lbs, or the ability to run 100m in 9.78 equally distributed between the sexes? Assuming that you do acknowledge such tangible physiological differences, doesn’t it seem improbable that there wouldn’t be *some* differences in other, non-athletic realms?

I didn’t mean to suggest that you went off-topic — I don’t think you did — just that you tend to steer considerations away from the considerations that those who disagree with you are — dammit — trying to focus on.
I would like to reserve that tactic for those who agree with me; personally, I would never do that.

EBD:
“[P]ersonally, I would never do that.” Damn, I wish I were as virtuous as you, but I fear I’m incorrigible. 🙂

It’s getting late and my hammock is calling, but I thought I’d add this while I remember.
Regarding “under-representation”, I wonder how Stanton knows that numerical gender parity is a ‘natural’ or desirable outcome in engineering and mathematics (and, presumably, in other spheres too). On what basis is she so sure that men and women “ought” to be roughly equal in number in any given profession? Or that they would be if all cultural obstacles are removed? Surely what matters is that women who *do* wish to become engineers or mathematicians, and who are suitably capable, can compete as fairly as possible. Whether that leads to a roughly 50/50 gender split in engineering or mathematics, or in any other profession, seems entirely beside the point.
And it seems to me that there’s a polarised ‘hair-trigger’ aspect to this subject, whereby it’s often assumed (as by Stanton) that a fairly unremarkable statement, even a simple question, automatically implies incorrigible caveman leanings or some nefarious unspoken agenda. Oddly enough, I really don’t care what sex my plumber is, and I’m not about to start campaigning for female engineers to be sent on corrective embroidery courses. But I’m not inclined to look kindly on pretentious educators like Stanton whose political ideology results in fits of passive-aggressive pantomime.
Maybe it’s just my nature.

Vitruvius,
It’s not clear to me whether Stanton is particularly interested in merit and ability, wherever it may lie, as opposed to gender quotas and theatrical gasping. And I won’t linger on the puzzle of a Vagina Warrior whose feelings are so easily hurt. “The things he said… they just weren’t true…!” [ sob, choke ]
“It is my conjecture that those who are doing the most complaining are those who see their identity as subordinate to their subset(s), thus they see subset differences as attacks on their subset, and so on their identity.”
Perhaps it’s the flipside of presuming to speak for all womanhood. It’s interesting to note how advocates of identity politics often regard gender, skin colour or sexuality in rather cartoonish ways. For instance, Duke professor Wahneema Lubiano seems to view “being black” as some kind of profession, as does the Guardian’s Joseph Harker, and in both cases factual challenges to their claims were hastily dismissed as racist persecution.
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2007/07/harker-barking.html
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2007/09/duke-division.html

Well, one more kick at this moldy cat. Today there was a news story confirming what is already generally well-known: girls are outperforming boys in high school, are more likely to go to and graduate from university, and do better on standardized reading tests.
Faced with this, the “innatists” go all nurturist on us, attributing this to feminist ideologizing, the “feminizing” of education, and (in the case of the Statistics Canada researchers about whose study we read this morning), it’s single-parent families headed by mothers, the Pygmalion effect, and a decline in the number of male teachers.
Innate abilities, in other words, go out the window when girls start to do better than boys. It must be discrimination. It must be the baleful influence of feminism. It must be the prominence of female authority figures. Anything but innate gender differences.
In response to this glaring inconsistency of approach, I have but one question. Suppose for the sake of argument that all this stuff about the reasons for girls’ success is true. Why is it so unlikely, then, given all of this apparent plasticity, that male dominance and privilege might have been responsible for (and in some areas might still be responsible for) the exclusion of girls and women from traditionally “male” occupations?

Dr Dawg,
“Faced with this, the ‘innatists’ go all nurturist on us, attributing this to feminist ideologizing,”
But I don’t recall anyone here doing that, and I’m not about to defend assertions I haven’t actually made. I wouldn’t regard myself as an “innatist”, nor would that describe most of the comments made by others in this thread. My point was Stanton’s implausible indignation at the suggestion that biology and disposition may have a role to play and her apparent assumption that numerical gender parity would emerge if certain social influences were removed. I’ve elaborated on this point at some length.
“Why is it so unlikely, then, given all of this apparent plasticity, that male dominance and privilege might have been responsible for (and in some areas might still be responsible for) the exclusion of girls and women from traditionally ‘male’ occupations?”
If memory serves, no-one here has denied the possible influence of tradition, social expectation, etc. Or “male dominance”, as you so colourfully put it. Again, you’re attacking positions that I haven’t advanced and don’t in fact hold. I refer you to my comments from yesterday, 21:44 and 22:39.

Sorry: I meant “on-going culture wars.” The notion of racial IQ differences has nothing to do with gender, obviously.

I think that such speculation on the part of male authority figures … plays into a social debate in harmful ways.
Let me get this clear.
We can’t entertain certain uncomfortable ideas, because whether they are true or false, they will harm society.
Some people might say that your speculations harm society. Would you be happy if they attempted to ban you?

But a university ought to be the place where unorthodox and indeed uncomfortable ideas are tested.
Who do you think harmed the reputation of women more: Summers by speculating that innate differences accounts for different numbers of men and women in the science or Stanton, with her attack of the dreaded vapours?
When I was at university I was asked to entertain some very uncomfortable ideas – that one in four university women had been raped. Or that the “rule of thumb” derived from a law about the size of stick it was permissible to use.
http://www.deltabravo.net/custody/tenmyths.php
http://www.debunker.com/texts/ruleofthumb.html
Are these falsehoods harmful to society? They still get repeated. My 10 year old son was told the “rule of thumb” only a fortnight ago.

“You do keep returning to the issue of race, rather slyly, I think.”
Not slyly in the least. Gender and race are both contested areas, in which a variety of opinions are held about relative abilities. Both have salience in a society of differing power and privilege assigned by gender and race. Gender bias elicits, or tends to elicit, less indignation in general than does racial bias. But both forms of prejudice are inimical to the individuals on the receiving end. Having an educator openly suggest that the under-representation of women in “hard” sciences is due to innate inability is hardly encouraging for students and faculty of the female persuasion. Entertaining aloud ideas of Black intellectual inferiority, had this happened, would have had similar kinds of effects–and brought forth similar, if perhaps more intense, indignation.
We must look at Summers’ position of authority, not simply the sentiments he flapped his gums about. He wasn’t just shooting the breeze; in a very real sense he was speaking ex cathedra.

So let’s look at Summers’ professional approach. Under his stewardship, 4 out of 32 offers of tenure went to women in the Arts & Sciences faculty in 2004. He drove noted African-American scholar Cornel West from his position–West fled to Princeton. Summers is fond of telling a story about giving two toy trucks to his young daughter, who apparently began calling one “Daddy truck” and one “Mommy truck.”
He was not talking simply about why women don’t *pursue* these careers. He was suggesting that “innate differences” account for actual success in these fields.
Just so we’re all on the same page, here are Summers’ remarks:
http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html

David:
I have no idea what the “proper” representation of women in the hard sciences ought o be. But barring some actual scientific evidence, not scientistic rationalizing by people like Summers, I’ll start with the default position, as noted earlier, and be prepared to move off it when evidence is presented.
It’s interesting that so much concern has been raised about Professor Stanton’s alleged dogmatism, intolerance of dissent and so on. Perhaps you might care to look at Mr. Summers with the same lens. With the usual caveats about Wikipedia, here is a summing up of his attitude while running Harvard:
“Besides the aforementioned controversies [West, women, etc.], which undoubtedly provided the proximate cause for Summers’ resignation, other factors have been proposed as contributing to his critical loss of support among the majority of faculty members. The first is Summers’ reputed leadership style, described by many as arrogant, blunt, and intolerant of dissenting opinions. Many faculty members claimed they felt intimidated into remaining silent when they disagreed with Summers.”
Gosh.

My apologies to Jeff for the wholesale posting, but I think this post from proteinwisdom.com kind of sums up the debate……
“That dream being the free exchange of ideas, once again under siege from inside the academy — the very place where the free exchange of ideas should, by the standards of liberalism, be most in evidence.
Alas, we’ve surrendered liberalism for the kind of creeping totalitarianism whose resemblance to liberalism is limited to a familiar smile and wink.
From the NYT:
The appointment of Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, as a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution is drawing fierce protests from faculty members and students at Stanford University and is threatening to rekindle tensions between the institution, a conservative research body, and the more liberal campus.
Some 2,100 professors, staff members, students and alumni have signed an online petition protesting Mr. Rumsfeld’s appointment, which will involve advising a task force on ideology and terrorism. Faculty members say he should not have been offered the post because of his role in the Bush administration’s prosecution of the Iraq war.
“We view the appointment as fundamentally incompatible with the ethical values of truthfulness, tolerance, disinterested enquiry, respect for national and international laws and care for the opinions, property and lives of others to which Stanford is inalienably committed,” the petition reads.
[…]
John Raisian, director of the Hoover Institution since 1989, defended the appointment, which was announced on Sept. 7, saying Mr. Rumsfeld is an expert on the subjects that the panel will study.
“I appointed him because he has three decades of experience, of incredible public service, especially in recent years as it relates to this question of ideology and terror,” Mr. Raisian said. Mr. Raisian said Mr. Rumsfeld had accepted the appointment, which would last one year.
Such short-term appointments, whether by the institution or by an academic department, do not require the extensive review that a tenure decision might.
[…]
The institution, which is housed in a tower close to the heart of the campus, has had close ties to Republican administrations, including Mr. Bush’s. Like graduate schools on campus, it operates largely independently from the university — with its own endowment and doing its own fund-raising — but still is part of the university.
At times, though, there have been tensions. In the late 1980s, some students and faculty members successfully fought a proposal championed by the director of the Hoover Institution to place Ronald Reagan’s presidential library on the campus. Last year, Mr. Bush planned to visit fellows at the Hoover Institution before having dinner with George P. Shultz, a former secretary of state who is also a fellow. But after protests, the meeting was moved to Mr. Shultz’s home.
Another potential conflict could involve Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, a former Stanford provost and Hoover fellow. Ms. Rice, who is on leave from a tenured faculty position, has said she would be interested in returning to Stanford after leaving the Bush administration. In a letter to Stanford’s undergraduate newspaper in May, a professor wrote that she should not be welcomed back.
Pamela M. Lee, a professor of art history who helped write the petition against Mr. Rumsfeld, said she hoped her protest would send a message and prompt the university to review its relationship with the Hoover Institution.
“It’s extremely important for the Hoover to know that their appointments are not in the mainstream of the Stanford community,” Professor Lee said, “as well as to send a very clear signal to the country that this is not what Stanford is about.”
Oh, the message is clear, alright — but I’m not sure it’s the message you’re hoping to send, Professor Lee. Because from here, it sounds something like this: “we have defined ourselves as the center, and from that position of mainstream authority we have positioned ourselves to decide who and what comes to count as so pernicious to the mainstream that it simply must not be tolerated.”
Evidently, having Rumsfeld doddering around near campus could lead one to inadvertently gaze upon him — at which point impressionable students paying big tuition dollars might turn into pillars of salt.
Dr Lee is just trying to protect them. For their own good.
Writes David Bernstein at Volokh:
according to Professor Lee, enforcing ideological conformity among the faculty is “what Stanford is all about.” Having one of the most distinguished public servants of the last half century–an objectively true statement, regardless of what one things of his politics–on campus three to five times (!) is not “what Stanford is all about.”
And, come to think of it, I can’t resist the contrast between the reaction to Rumsfeld at Stanford and, judging from the stories in the Columbia Spectator, the almost complete quiescence, apart from some Jewish groups, at Columbia regarding the invitation to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In fact, according to the Spectator, some of the harshest criticism received by Columbia president Lee Bollinger is that he didn’t criticize Minutemen Project found Jim Gilchrist, invited by students last years, as he has Ahmadinejad.
Up is down. Black is White. Jonah has a blow hole and likes to sup on plankton and shrimp cocktail.

Dr Dawg,
“That’s going a trifle far.”
No it isn’t. The gender bias, if any, of a mathematics department isn’t determined simply by whether or not it employs an equal number of men and women in positions of comparable status. If there are other, dispositional, variables to consider in who pursues the subject to advanced levels, or other factors regarding the availability of suitable female candidates or their persistence in the field, then a gender parity of employed mathematicians might just as plausibly indicate an anomaly, a lowering of standards or a bias in favour of women. To assume that, magically stripped of all external influences, the male and female population “should” be perfectly symmetrical in interests, skills and dispositions is just that – an assumption. A prejudice, if you will.
As I said, I haven’t heard of vast numbers of disaffected female would-be mathematicians, all grumbling about exclusion because of sexism and male patriarchy. What matters is that those women who do have talent and drive in the discipline are able to compete for positions on an equal footing. No-one here would argue with that. But whether that fair footing leads to a 50/50 gender split or not is entirely beside the point. And to imply, as Stanton does, that *more* women “ought” to be interested in advanced mathematics as a career seems absurd; as does the claim that if relatively few women choose this career, then there must be some kind of systemic gender bias or “oppression” taking place. And attempting to engineer some supposed “correction” of who is interested in what is to skate on perilously thin ice.

Dawg:
“I had no idea that Rummy had serious academic credentials….I do note, however, that there is general outrage and bluster in that quarter about the visit of Ahmedinejad to Columbia.”
What academic credentials does Ahmedinejad have? Beside holocaust denial.
And do you not see any difference between Rumsfeld and Ahmedinejad?

Tom:
“And do you not see any difference between Rumsfeld and Ahmedinejad?”
A rather obvious one–the latter isn’t being offered a university appointment.
David:
I won’t respond the the last except to re-iterate my earlier question: if Mr. Summers was to speak about the innate deficiency in IQ of Blacks, would you have invited him to dinner? I get the feeling that this question is being studiously ducked, but it might just be the lateness of the hour.

When studying failure-mode problems, it’s always a good idea to have some good example failures to work with. That’s why when discussing the failure modes of universities, we can finally find an argument for the utility of Dr. Dawg.

Dawg:
“A rather obvious one–the latter isn’t being offered a university appointment.”
How about Summers and Ahmedinejad?
And for the record, could you point out precisely what Summers said that is so controversial?

Not at all, Dawg. I just think that the style of fraud that you and your fellow SSHRC travelers perpetrate is exactly the sort of failure mode that threatens to become endemic in universities, not just in the silly-studies departments as it now is, but even in the parts that heretofore worked, like science, medicine, and engineering, upon which our high standard of living depends. Our high standard of living is not dependent on what you do. It is dependent on what I do. Note that that doesn’t say anything special about me, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.
When prioritizing what one would fight against doing without, I would first fight against doing without oxygen for more than a couple minutes. Then water. Food and shelter are three and four, but the temporal order may be reversed depending on the current weather. And so we work down the list, in some order, fuel, sanitary waste disposal, medicine, transportation, and so on. Art? Sure, but everyone can do art. On the other hand, we can do without academic poseurs inventing faux-problems for personal power-struggle games and then putting words in other persons mouths when the examination of reality turns against them.

Yes Dawg, I know. However I asked what PRECISELY it was that offended. Please give us the passage that makes Dr. Summers and his ideas so dangerous.

Tom:
I think the notion, over-all, that women are innately less capable than men in the hard sciences, math and engineering. But that’s just a wild guess. And possibly the gratuitous Mommy and Daddy truck nonsense. But perhaps the women involved should speak, not me:
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2005/01/17/summers_remarks_on_women_draw_fire/
http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2005/01/19/harvard_womens_group_rips_summers/
In the second reference, the quite valid point is made (at least, from where I sit) that such remarks from the leader of an institution might have a chilling effect on recruitment. But I’ve shot my bolt on this.

Vitruvius made an excellent point about Asperger Syndrome. That’s a phenomenon that can be measured somewhat: it DOES predominate in males and it DOES predispose one to the harder sciences.
I am a female who has a mild case of Asperger’s, and I know another woman who was a fully fledged Asperger’s case. Both of us are into the Humanities, but we also have an affinity for technology. I, for example, am a technical writer, and I find that I’m good at learning how things work quickly, moreso than my “neurotypical” colleagues.
Asperger’s is the result of the way the brain is organized in utero and therefore has a profound impact on one’s abilities and predilections. I experience this every day as I excel at some things others struggle with and utterly cannot do other things that are second nature to most people.
Dr Dawg, to imply a parallel between race and gender is to make a false analogy. The physiological differences between the “races” has to do with the amount of pigmentation in the skin. It’s cosmetic. It affects your vulnerability to skin cancer. But skin pigmentation has no effect on brain development. The only people who imply that there are further types of differences between the races were using junk science (phrenology and other speculation before the advent of brain scanning technology), junk philosophy (white supremacism), or junk morality. Anyone who continues to do so in this day and age does so without an ounce of scientific proof.
Gender, on the other hand, is a whole different matter. The two sexes are created by powerful hormones that change the shape of the body and have a strong hand at organizing the brain. The differences have been observed in brain scans and in controlled experimentation.
You will of course notice that male and female mammals have highly differing habits, dispositions, and behaviors, and that their sex hormones are the same as ours. For example, if testosterone makes bulls and stags and stallions sexually aggressive, is it any wonder that it does so in humans?
Furthermore, while there is no proof that there are significant IQ differences between the sexes, the call of biology often leads women to choose to raise children rather than pursue a career. Our emotional needs are different from a man’s because our brains are different. That a woman chooses to listen to her biology rather than her peers is no scandal.
It seems strange to me that modern feminists would demand that women abandon what they want to do in order to fulfill some arbitrary quota that people like Stanton think should exist. Wasn’t this all about choice to begin with?
So to answer your question: “If Mr. Summers was [were] to speak about the innate deficiency in IQ of Blacks, would you have invited him to dinner?” the answer is NO, I would not, unless I felt I had the chance to persuade him differently.

Since Larry Summers has apparently committed a crime against women, we might as well quote from the incendiary speech that got him into so much trouble:
“…if one is talking about physicists at a top twenty-five research university, one is not even talking about people who are two standard deviations above the mean…it’s talking about people who are three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean in the one in 5,000, one in 10,000 class. Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool…”
And from that same outrageous speech:
“Surely there is (overt discrimination)…No one who’s been in a university department or who has been involved in personnel process can deny that this…does go on, and it is something that happens, and it is something that absolutely, vigorously needs to be combated.”
That’s the sort of talk that simply does not belong on any campus.

Morning all. Heavens, the wagon rumbles on.
Dr Dawg,
“I read Summers’ notes on women in the hard sciences… and can quite see how his mode of presenting his ideas might have created a reaction.”
But you still, even now, haven’t shown *why* that reaction was justified or credible. It seems much more obvious that the vehemence and censoriousness of the protest (and the curious lack of specifics) reflects on those protesting and their dogmatic stance, not on Summers’ speech.
“But I still maintain that his position is intellectually slovenly.”
But, again, you’ve yet to show that it is. Nothing you’ve said thus far demonstrates a remotely credible reason for such pronounced umbrage. Instead, it suggests a grossly unprofessional prickliness and intolerance among parts of the faculty. (The word “blasphemy” springs to mind, and possibly “apostate”.)
To argue that Summers’ comments might “discourage recruitment” sidesteps completely the issue of whether what he actually said is intellectually legitimate and deserving of discussion. And favouring the hypothetical hypersensitivity of hypothetical female candidates over an attempt to determine truth speaks volumes.

So many comments–so little time. 🙂
dicentra (and hello, by the way):
I’m aware that some principled conservatives stood up for Chermerinski. Even David Horowitz wavered a bit before reverting to type. It was a truly egregious, indefensible case. But last I heard, Norman Finkelstein is still looking for work, as is a colleague who stood up for him, and John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt are having appearances cancelled out from under them. And Daniel Pipes’ national snitch line is going full-bore.
For the record, I suspect that David is entirely consistent on academic freedom, and I don’t believe I have ever suggested otherwise. Others out there in the wide world have been–less so.
But to your other post for a moment. I am not unaware that there are specific diseases and syndromes that are gender- (and also ethnic-)related. I am thinking of androgenized female fetuses, for example, the resulting female children having a pronounced tendency to lesbianism. So I don’t want my position in this debate to be caricatured. I’m not arguing against all evidence that there is no difference between the genders when it comes to neural information-processing. Rather, I am arguing for caution.
I mentioned earlier that the Engineering faculty at McGill, when I attended many years ago, had exactly one woman enrolled in engineering. The numbers have obviously shot up since, and in math and science too. We aren’t at parity; but we are so far ahead of where we were earlier that one has to wonder whether hypotheses of “innate” this or that might be less sustainable than social hypotheses.
On the question of race, we are in essential agreement. But there are those who still argue that it’s more than skin colour, and they’re in universities, too; for example, Kevin McDonald, who thinks that Jews are genetically programmed to destroy white Christian culture, or Phillippe Rushton, who (amongst other things) raises penis size in a “racial” context as an inverse correlate of intelligence (which, by his own logic, should make gorillas the rulers of us all, but no matter). So I raised the construct of race as an analogy because it works as one in culture wars where both are salient.
My bottom line? I suspect that much of gender is a construct as well, but sexual dimorphism is an obvious fact of our species, and it may well be that some aptitudes and modes of thinking are innate. Assumptions in that respect, though, keep getting shattered. More women than men attend Canadian universities today. Fifty years ago, who’d a thunk it?
Back, then, to caution. We shouldn’t imagine that Summers was speaking as an academic, because his speech wasn’t delivered in that context, and besides, his expertise is in economics. He was speaking as a university president: he was wondering aloud whether the under-enrollment of women in engineering, science and math might have something to do with innate capacity. In that context, it was a political speech, and produced a political reaction. I think that university presidents, as public and hence political figures, should take a little more care. Summers is not a tactful man. It can be wounding to a young girl considering math as a career to have such pronouncements made by public leaders of academe. The authority of his office is an important consideration.
EBD:
I had already–twice–posted a link to that speech. It is delivered in academese, and is not composed of inflammatory rhetoric. But let me offer three examples of comments I think some women might be concerned about:
“So my sense is that the unfortunate truth-I would far prefer to believe something else, because it would be easier to address what is surely a serious social problem if something else were true-is that the combination of the high-powered job hypothesis and the differing variances probably explains a fair amount of this problem.”
“I guess my experience with my two and a half year old twin daughters who were not given dolls and who were given trucks, and found themselves saying to each other, look, daddy truck is carrying the baby truck, tells me something. And I think it’s just something that you probably have to recognize. There are two other hypotheses that are all over. One is socialization. Somehow little girls are all socialized towards nursing and little boys are socialized towards building bridges. No doubt there is some truth in that. I would be hesitant about assigning too much weight to that hypothesis… First, most of what we’ve learned from empirical psychology in the last fifteen years has been that people naturally attribute things to socialization that are in fact not attributable to socialization….”
[It’s really been the reverse over the past three or four decades. Things believed to be innate turn out to be socialization. Yup, women can thrive in the trades and make fine doctors. Yup, Blacks can be university professors.]
“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.”
[This is the free market argument: I’ve seen it made in other contexts to “prove” that widespread employment discrimination is a myth. What Summers is ignoring, besides the fact that a free market as such doesn not exist and never has, is the two-fold nature of discrimination. On the one hand, those with power, such as employers, can discriminate. On the other, those in groups that have suffered historical discrimination can internalize that discrimination and see themselves as inferior or incapable. The same thing is true in non-gender and non-racial contexts: the barriers, for example, to working-class university attendance are not solely financial. This is a long side-discussion, though.]
David:
I’ve made some of my points above. But I would hold to my characterization of Summers’ speech. He notes, for example, that enrollments of women in the disciplines under discussion have risen substantially; in the next breath, he doubts that socialization (and discrimination) have anything to do with current under-enrollments. How did such enrollemtns ever rise in the first place? (Yes, he offers handwaves to the effect that discrimination exists, but in the context of his speech, that seems to be merely tactical.) So it’s as though discrimination passed the baton to innate characteristics when enrollments allegedly peaked. (What evidence is there, by the way, in the long term, that enrollments have indeed peaked at 25% or so?)
As for the free market argument, why not apply it to the employment of Blacks say fifty years ago? If we assume that there are a lot of bright, capable Blacks around, and that there always have been, how did the market fail them so utterly? Why did it take civil rights marches and legislation?
But let me re-iterate a point that might have been lost in all this. I understand very much the indignation of academic women who have probably fought the hard fight against discrimination to get where they were, in a lot of cases. No one should be surprised by it. To be upset by the passion of some women in this case seems odd to me. I still think, however, that arguing with Summers beats driving him from the dinner-table.

David:
Given your propensity for accusing me of erecting straw men in th past, it seems to me that you might, in this instance, want to look in the mirror. I have never argued that Summers was “wicked,” nor that his remarks were “malicious” in intent. I am not “outraged” easily, either. Nor, as I have pointed out more than once in this very thread, do I take the absolutist position that *only* social conditioning defines behaviour. So let’s torch this beast and move on.
Why judging the effects of the pronouncements of powerful authority figures makes me illiberal is anyone’s guess. I think it’s a matter of simple observation. The women who have expressed passionate objection to Summers have, I suspect, engaged in precisely the debates that you favour all of their professional lives. Perhaps they’re a little tired of them by now, when uttered as pronouncements by university presidents in public settings. It’s not as though Summers said anything new, after all. In other words, these women are simply pissed off. This appears to surprise and shock you. So be it.
Do you think that the notion of power relations in society is a mere invention arising from the febrile brains of feminists and post-modernists? Do you think that Summers’ position of authority had nothing to do with the reaction to, and possibly the effect of, his remarks? I don’t believe in being “protective” of anyone in this context, but being respectful is another matter. And a young woman looking for a career in mathematics might think twice about applying to an institution that holds that underrepresentation of women in the mathematics department there is genetic in origin.

David:
I think we’re talking past each other. People are more than the sum of their professional qualifications and their abilities to engage in the civil debate that you champion. Sometimes they’re just human, and react viscerally when provoked–as do you and I on occasion, I suspect. That’s also part of life on campus, and off.

Shorter David: Feminists strove for years to chip away at the orthodoxy that “women can’t” do thus and so because of their soft brains and dispositions. But now that they’ve been able to establish their own orthodoxy of social constructionism, they’re just as obtuse and protective as those they sought to depose and use the same odious tactics to enforce that orthodoxy as their predecessors.
Shorter Dr Dawg: They ought to have behaved thus because what Summers said is beyond the pale. The orthodoxy is correct, and challenges thereto are not worthy of consideration.

This may not be fun, in the usual sense, but it sure is compelling.
Dawg, earlier in the thread you stated that you have a “problem” with any suggestion that particular abilities might be “unequally distributed” by gender.
Later in the thread you wrote, in an exasperated-ish tone suggesting you’ve been clear on the matter all along, that you “do not take the absolutist position that only social conditioning defines behaviour.”
I’m going to assume — just for a moment, it’ll pass — that the most recent statement is in fact your position. Question: If social conditioning is *not* the only factor in determining aptitudes and abilities, what might the other factor(s) be?

Sometimes, when analysis paralysis sets in, it can be useful to revisit the undergirding issues: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCIyzNISw1Q

David:
“Whether or not meritocratic selection has been achieved cannot be determined by whether or not gender parity results.”
Which of course is a key issue. But as someone who has actively studied the notion of “merit” in the Canadian public service, I can assure you that this is not an unproblematic notion in itself. Judgments about “merit” in that forum include “personal suitability” as a selection factor. Will the candidate fit in? You can see the dangers.
No doubt the merit principle was in full operation back in the days when women in the hard sciences were a rarity. And no doubt it’s in full swing now, when there are more women than men enrolled at university (if not in the senior ranks of tenured faculty).
“Merit” is anything but an objective set of criteria, objectively applied. You are right, though, to assert that the fairness of the process cannot be simply judged by its outcomes. But one’s suspicions can still be aroused, particularly over a lengthy period of time in which the same notion of “merit” has presumably been in place, but women are making an increasing mark in the hard sciences, mathematics and engineering, with vastly increased enrollments and much larger numbers of academic faculty. We really only have two explanations to choose from in the light of that observation: either the genetic inheritance of women has somehow improved in the past thirty years, or some social filter was at play earlier.
So when I see a supposedly “objective” selection system result in significantly different outcomes for gender (or “race”), I might want to look at the thing more closely. By itself, I agree it isn’t *proof* of anything: but it does arouse my suspicions. One doesn’t need to insist on a 50/50 outcome from the start to poke around to see if there are systemic biases at work. There obviously were some in academe in the 1950s and 1960s.

The way I see it, the icing on the cake is that everyone here has consistently agreed that no person should be denied the opportunity to pursue any legal direction, objective, or goal of theirs by any mechanism or methodology of institutional bias based on gender or race. We also all agree, I think, that statistics do not prejudge individuals.
Furthermore, everyone but one here agrees, if I’m not mistaken, with Summers’ observation that it is reasonable to conjecture that there may be some genetically correlated statistical observations that can be made about some kinds of behaviour in some cases.
Using Shannon’s definition of information, the interesting thing about this discussion is therefore the one exception. Why is there this exception?
Sir Wilfrid Laurier (Canada’s best historic prime minister so far) once said, “Experience has established that institutions, which at the outset were useful, often end by becoming intolerable abuses owing to the simple fact that everything around them has changed […] and they have not”.
Last June, Thomas Sowell wrote, “The sad and tragic fact is that the civil rights movement, despite its honorable and courageous past, has over the years degenerated into a demagogic hustle, promoting the mindless racism they once fought against”.
I think the reason for the singular exception to the norm here is its institutional relationship to (if I may paraphrase Mr. Sowell), the sad and tragic fact that the womens’ rights movement, despite its honorable and courageous past, has over the years degenerated into a demagogic hustle, promoting the mindless sexism they once fought against.

Who is this Tony you keep referring to, Dr. Dawg? No one has commented here as Tony, or been referenced in any link as Tony.

Given that you comment as Dr. Dawg, I would assume that you also wish to use the cloak of anonymity to avoid being called by your name. I respect that. But given that I know your name, and have never divulged it on the web, I consider your behaviour above to be hypocritical.
Meanwhile, if you wish to critique my long-ago associations with, say, the IEEE or the ACM, go ahead. I will address them as they arise. I will not withdraw my criticism of the agenda of the SSHRC and those who promulgate similar snake-oil.

For sure, watch out for that long hair, ladies and gentlemen, just don’t tell Leonardo da Vinci: http://tinyurl.com/yth6ho

And don’t forget, as Don Ho sings (as I believe it’s sung in these parts) “The Hammock Calls”, it’s “merely a government granting agency”. No risk there, eh what?

Roger that. Actually, the only history is what I’ve read on this here intarweb thingy. Anyway, thanks for being such a gracious host, David, and for the cake and music. Vitruvius out.

Sorry, David, but it seems to me that you’re trying to have it both ways. You serve cake, and you act like you’re trying to calm down a volatile situation, but then you crank up a song clearly meant to incite violence.
Who *are* you?