Larry Summers has some supporters

Must be troglodytes. An AP story in the NYTimes:

Harvard University president Lawrence Summers has suffered acrimonious condemnation, and may have jeopardized his job, for suggesting that the underrepresentation of women in engineering and some scientific fields may be due in part to inherent differences in the intellectual abilities of the sexes. But Summers could be right....

``Among people who do the research, it's not so controversial. There are lots and lots of studies that show that mens' and womens' brains are different,'' says Richard J. Haier, a professor of psychology in the pediatrics department of the University of California Los Angeles medical school....

``I think it's an outrage that certain questions -- that real, important questions -- can't be raised in an academic atmosphere, that research that's well-known can't be presented without some sort of hysterical response,'' says Linda S. Gottfredson, a psychologist at the University of Delaware.

As they say, read the whole thing: Click here: The New York Times > AP > Science > Summers' Remarks Supported by Some Experts

And then there is James Atlas' NYTimes Week in Review column:

It's not that Mr. Summers thinks of himself as a conservative. He was Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, and before that, chief economist of the World Bank.

What's made Mr. Summers so controversial, said Nicholas Lemann, a Harvard graduate and now the dean of Columbia University's journalism school, is that he's conservative "not in his politics, but in the context of the university." "Just about everything he's done that's gotten attention is about a tug to the center," Mr. Lemann said....

By being naturally and deliberately provocative, he has challenged campus liberals, which is not what campus liberals are accustomed to. Click here: The New York Times > Week in Review > The Battle Behind the Battle at Harvard

Virginia Postrel also has some comments in the Business section of the NYT: Click here: The New York Times > Business > Economic Scene: Some Economists Say the President of Harvard Talks Just Like Them