Harvard's Three Presidents
Harvard seems to have an excess of presidents right now, even as it's going through something of a power vacuum. It's an odd situation. FAS dean Jeremy Knowles has stepped down; one president is outgoing; one president is incoming; one president is returning.
Yesterday,
Drew Faust and four other female presidents of Ivy League universities gathered to talk about women and leadership. Faust continued her policy of keeping mum about her opinions and priorities.*
Faust listened carefully but refrained from expressing her own opinions throughout the discussion, as she prepares to become the fifth woman to lead an Ivy League university.
At the same time,
Derek Bok e-mailed the entire campus to start a discussion on calendar reform, suggesting that he has no intention of acting like a lame duck.
Meanwhile, stealing the thunder of both Bok and Faust,
Larry Summers spoke yesterday at the final class of "Morality and Taboo," a course taught by Summers supporters Steve Pinker and Alan Dershowitz, on the subject of his women-in-science speech.
Summers made a joke about not being able to imagine why he was invited to a class on morality and taboo, then ate some crow.
All kinds of girls all over the world were reading that the president of Harvard believes that they can’t do math,” Summers recalled yesterday. He said that his position at the University’s helm should have kept him from acting as an “intellectual provocateur.”
Then Summers actually took another shot at explaining the paucity of women in science and math.
In a brief aside, Summers compared girls and boys who earn a perfect score on their math SATs. The girls, he said, are more likely to score higher on the verbal portion of the test. Summers then asked rhetorically whether it should be “shocking or disturbing” that those girls choose to enter fields broader than math, given their “superior verbal abilities.”
I suppose the man deserves credit for venturing back into what are, for him, such dangerous waters. But to my mind, this is a little bit like Mitt Romney saying he disapproves of Scientology. Why even raise the issue?
Summers also took a shot at the faculty in discussing the reasons for his ouster.
“
Some of it undoubtedly had to do with the issues we’re discussing,” he said, “but part of it also had to do with my conviction to push the faculty into places that they were less willing to go.”
It would be interesting for some interviewer to follow up on that and ask Summers exactly what places he is referring to. He has made this claim several times, but never, I think, in a forum where there's an opportunity for a follow-up question. (Or if he has, no one's ever asked it.)
As long as Summers makes this claim vaguely, he gets away with it. But the second he offers specifics, people are going to call him on them.
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* All quotes are from the Harvard Crimson articles linked to.
