House of Eratosthenes

Very frequently in life we run into an event which, in the aftermath, presents us with an unpalatable decision. We may comment audibly on what it is we have just seen, which is to commit the grievous sin of belaboring the obvious. Or we may keep quiet, which raises the very real specter of yet another lap on the ol’ merry go-stupid.

Age has something to do with this. Show me a man whose heart has beat for four decades or more, and I’ll show you someone who’s tired of the ride, and would rather belabor the obvious than go ’round again. We’re over forty, so belabor it we shall.

So what really happened two years ago, when the events were put in motion that would eventually cost Larry Summers his job as President of Harvard? You remember, don’t you. The former Treasury Secretary under President Clinton made a comment or two about the paucity of successful women in science and engineering pursuits. He said it might be symptomatic of an aptitude differential between the sexes. In other words, perhaps there are innate differences between men and women.

Everything after that was just yet another chapter in a book we’ve already read many times. He apologized, he apologized again, he apologized again-again, he apologized for his previous apologies, and then he left to go spend more time with his family.

Which provided rich ammunition for conservatives. President Summers did not say the ladies were suffering in their academic achievements because they didn’t have what it takes to succeed. He did not, by any account, say anything about the extent to which their potential was limited in an engineering field. In fact, it seems he didn’t deny anything about traditional gender discrimination that might be taking place, in the present, in hiring and acceptance decisions. And that is where the story gets rich. Summers was commenting that perhaps what we’re seeing is a combination of several factors at work; discrimination — and some other stuff too.

For that kind of comment to cost him his job, sends the unmistakable message: A hundred pounds of underrepresentation, is a hundred pounds of discrimination, not an ounce less. Thou art not to think of anything else, or thine career is forfeit.

You can’t extrapolate any other message from the Summers flotsam-and-jetsam. Of course, it makes it a little sticky when there are no transcripts of what Summers actually said; you knew that too, didn’t you? No, really. Think back. You might have read here and there about the substance of his comments, as interpreted by some reporter for the Boston Globe…or what someone told that reporter. Maybe a friend-of-a-friend type thing. But you didn’t read any hard quotes.

Searching for some, I did trip across this thing which purports to be a word-for-word transcript. It may very well be exactly that. One problem with that is, several stories have come out about this putting the words “innate” and/or “innately” into hard scare-quotes, as if he used those words, and I don’t find them in the transcript. A mistake must have been made somewhere.

But the transcript does look impressively…complicated. It has the appearance of being the product of some kind of recording device. I’ll assume it’s genuine, not that it matters much I suppose.

So accepting that, let’s take a look at what he said.

There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities that this conference’s papers document and have been documented before with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions. One is what I would call…the high-powered job hypothesis. The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end, and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search. And in my own view, their importance probably ranks in exactly the order that I just described.

Now, ya got that? Summers is saying what we seem to be looking at, is a mixture of three different forces at work. The most impactful factor is that when you have a “high-powered job,” more will be expected of you, and overall men are going to have an easier time integrating such a professional life with the other aspects of their lives. The second biggest factor is that women and men bring different sets of aptitudes to those demanding jobs. And the third factor, least important among the three, is good old-fashioned discrimination.

Summers’ failure to skip the first two of those, and leapfrog down to #3, was just too much for Nancy Hopkins. “When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn’t breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill,” the MIT professor said.

Well, there must be a prevailing viewpoint at work, otherwise Summers would not have been forced to resign. And clearly the prevailing viewpoint was aptly represented, in some way, by Hopkins’…gag reflex, I guess.

If we shall belabor the obvious, let us do so by examining all the elements minus the one that arouses all the emotion. We got a bunch of college eggheads in a room somewhere and the college eggheads are tackling a problem. Let us say the problem is — a business is making widgets and people aren’t buying as many of the widgets as they used to. Egghead One steps up to the podium and says hey, I see three things the business can be doing better, and in order of importance here they are. One, Two, Three. Egghead Two gets all pissy because Egghead One cited three things instead of just one. Egghead Two loses her lunch and Egghead One has to resign.

Now what are we to think of such an environment? That it takes very little to make people barf, isn’t a fair conclusion to draw; my hypothetical, by design, removes a situation that gets a lot of people very excited, and justifiably so. However — it is quite fair to draw the conclusion that, for whatever reason, we have an enviornment here that looks at simplified solutions. And it uses some teeth when it looks at the simplified solutions. Summers said, gee, let’s look at this thing and that thing, and that other thing over there…end result is he’s out on his ass.

And in real life the situation is a little more complicated than that. The President of the United States, a Republican widely seen as an easy target for removal and disgrace, had just been re-elected with the greatest number of popular votes in the nation’s history. Our liberals wanted some blood and fresh meat. It’s a funny thing about our liberals; when they win, they want blood — and when they lose, they still want blood. Always, no matter what happens, the onus is put on everybody else to appease the liberals because of something that just happened, whatever that something may be. It seems there is no situation possible, in theory or in fact, that will ever make liberals shut up and go away even for a little while.

But anyway, George Bush had just been re-elected and the liberals wanted to be placated.

And yet. What does this say about Harvard, and about higher education in general? Over and over again, we are told that a higher education allows you to see the permutations of “gray” in each situation that comes along, that our academic hallways are places wherein situations can be reviewed for the complexity involved in them, and solutions evaluated with vigor, with peer-review and the like. Such tolerance at work, nothing is shunned save for the concept of the overly-simplified solution.

But — how does it shake out? Larry Summers says “you know what, maybe the cat isn’t bathing because he’s old AND sick.” And for this, out he goes. To seriously entertain multiple causes of a common perceived problem, it would seem, is something best left to the world outside the ivy-covered walls. Inside, we’ll stick to our monochromatic diagnoses, thank you very much. There’s that nausea to think about, ya know.

So that’s one thing. And the other thing is even more obvious…and I really don’t want to make anyone up-chuck here, but here it is.

The issue is innate differences between the genders. Summers lost his job because he didn’t think innate differences were off the table. He went ahead and discussed them, and shame on him. Well, now — suppose the subject had turned to the development of those differences, and someone stepped forward to point out that girls mature faster than boys. Which, in just about all the ways that matter, they really do. Watch girls and boys sometime, you can see it. Take a given age, and a girl has more going on in general, than a boy…and this impacts later development in a number of ways.

It’s an innate difference.

Would anyone have lost their job for pointing that out? Heh. Don’t count on it.

Now, that’s a bias. There’s really nothing wrong with having a bias in & of itself, it’s the way people think. I would compare it to achieving old age: At first blush it seems like a pretty bad thing, but it’s wonderful when you consider the alternative. But it is still a weakness, and when it is sheltered and nurtured, even as it is used to justify the removal of a high official simply for pointing out possible causes to a problem that has been proven to be difficult to solve, and to involve a lot of permutations — something is busted. It’s even more busted when the purpose of the conference is stated to be “National Bureau of Economic Research Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce,” and people are being ousted simply for discussing more than one causative factor insofar as the diversity desired has not yet been achieved.

To put it more simply, if you’re just going to sit around and jaw about good ol’ discrimination, then what the hell is the point?

I have my own biases against higher education and I have my reasons for having ’em. And so the question that remains, is something along the lines of: What else is broke? The spectacle of Nancy Hopkins getting ready to kneel before the porcelain god and blow chunks, is quite a silly and distracting one, but it threatens to conceal multiple layers of intellectual dysfunction beneath the surface. Educators at all levels are frequently heard to say “I’m not here to teach you what to think, I’m here to teach you how to think.” They mold and shape the minds of tomorrow’s leaders.

So…how are they teaching students to think? It seems “don’t do it” would be the most accurate answer to that one.

Is this what the boardrooms of tomorrow are like, then? All the most luminous and educated minds in a given organization meet to re-investigate some perplexing problem…dealing with sales, marketing, diversity — perhaps the defense of the nation? Perhaps halting the spread of AIDS, or the curing of Cancer, or whatever plague has replaced those two? And…if-and-when any one amongst them dares to say “Hey, I notice there may be one or several ancillary causes to this problem we should think about inspecting” — he’s out on his ass?

That seems pretty dire. And more than a little ridiculous. But, but, but. Why should I not ponder such a thing? This is Harvard. Creme de la creme of our educational community. They suffered a little bit of embarrassment for a little while, and then I have to assume they went back to their usual way of doing things, eventually replacing Larry Summers with a Radcliffe feminist. So we know how they work, and there’s no reason to think there are too many universities that work any differently.

All those who acknowledge the truism of Think I Know #93 above, and wonder why it is so. Behold.

Nurseries of tomorrow’s leaders. Concerned? Should we be? How much?

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Nurseries of Tomorrow’s LeadersSunday, March 4th, 2007

Nurseries of Tomorrow’s Leaders
Sunday, March 4th, 2007