Shots In The Dark

The Daily Californian, the newspaper of the University of California at Berkeley, has this take on the women in science issue. You won't find this article in the "Harvard in the News" wrap-up, but it's representative of a genre I've seen quite a bit of in the past few weeks: college newspapers using Larry Summers' remarks on women in science to demonstrate how much more progressive their institution/president is than Harvard/'s.

Two thoughts:

1) Individually and collectively, these articles damage Harvard's reputation. It's a subtle thing, but Harvard is becoming better known for the off-base remarks of its controversial president than for all the amazing scholarship and remarkable graduates the university produces.

2) One of the striking things about Harvard's culture is how masculine it is. In ways small and big, obvious and subtle, from the number of female tenured faculty, the coolness of much social interaction, the macho, competitive culture—even the fact that out of something like 42 portraits in the faculty room, only two are of women. And don't even get me started on the subject of Hanna Gray...

I can't help but think that this gender-construction at Harvard is unhealthy, and it's one of the ways in which Larry Summers was a problematic choice for president. He was steeped in masculine cultures from the time he went to college, if not before. More, he'd scorn the intellectual genres—women's studies, for example—that would provide some insight into this state of affairs.....