FIRE blog & Larry Summers

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has a new blog. It is currently heavy on the Ward Churchill affair (they believe in free speech even for idiots) but there is a link at the end to a Boston Phoenix column by Harvey Silverglate castigating Larry Summers of Harvard for turning tail and running when assailed by the PCers for his daring to ask a highly unPC question.

As far as I can get from the incredibly bad reporting I've read on the subject, he proposed three possible reasons for the dearth of woman at the top in sciences, one of which is so unacceptable that it cannot even be mentioned, much less researched.

This is apparently a topic where results must be by fiat, which attitude shows precious little confidence in results otherwise. Self demeaning if you ask me, and even if you don't. As I said on this before:

Summers, as far as I can tell from the lousy reportage on this story, never said all women are less capable than men, only that it is possible that the distribution is different, and that if that is the case, one of the possible explanations is genetic differences, and that another is family commitments which are not identical to those of men competing for the same jobs.

Apparently the test distributions really are different: men have more very high and very low achievers while women have equally high and low achievers but tend to cluster toward the middle. The causes of the different distributions appears to be debatable...or I guess they actually aren't.

Silverglate:

(Larry Summers) could have called a national press conference and invited his detractors to debate issues of academic freedom, entrenched orthodoxies, intellectual research and inquiry, and modalities that might indeed remedy real gender discrimination in the academy. He could have freed himself and every other academic administrator from a tyranny that has turned our university presidents into captives of groupthink — nothing more than yes-men and -women and, oh yes, fundraisers. He could have restored the role of university president from that of mere administrator and fundraiser to public intellectual — defender of academic freedom and rational discourse.

Whover is in the right on this, that would have been an interesting debate. What a shame he passed up the opportunity.

Direct to the Larry Summers article in the Boston Phoenix: http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/other_stories/multi_3/documents/04431349.asp

See my previous comments with links at: http://wudndux.blogspot.com/2005/01/much-reviled-charles-murray.html

An update of mine on this: http://wudndux.blogspot.com/2005/01/sex-based-differences.html

Thanks to Virginia Postrel for the lead to the FIRE blog: http://www.dynamist.com/weblog/