Limning Larry
An interesting side note from the Globe article: Summers' spokesman mentions that Summers was basing his statements about Native Americans on a number of sources he'd read, including Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" and an article in Commentary magazine.
(Incidentally, we don't know who Summers' spokesman is, because as with erstwhile presidential flack Lucie McNeil, Summers apparently doesn't want the person quoted by name. Thus we have the curious phenomenon of a university president who won't speak to the press on the record and will only allow his spokesman to be identified as his "spokesman." Transparency, anyone?)
But on to the main point.... This isn't the first time Summers has gotten in trouble for delivering remarks to an academic audience based on his reading of a popular book. His women-in-science comments were drawn from Steven Pinker's book, "The Blank Slate."
Why is this important? Well, for one thing, because Summers delivers these remarks with a posture of omniscience, but he's generally speaking to people who've written more specialized materials than these popular works. That's a recipe for trouble.
Summers clearly has an affinity for popular tomes. Why? Perhaps he's playing catch-up after a decade away from academia in Washington. Or, as some Harvardians suspect, perhaps he disdains humanities-related scholarship that isn't popular. If it's not read by a wider audience, Summers isn't interested.
That could be one reason why Summers has such an affinity for celebrity academics like Pinker, Luke Menand, Michael Ignatieff, Samantha Power, Malcolm Gladwell, et al. He doesn't see the point of intellectuals who don't reach a broader, "real world" audience. Not a humanist himself, and uncomfortable with the humanities, he depends on data to evaluate works in the humanities. In this case, the data appear to be sales figures.
