Harvard ought to fire Larry Summers for acting like a girl
A nice synopsis of quotes from Debra Saunders:
In his infamous speech to the National Bureau of Economic Research, Summers noted that women often don’t want to work the hours needed to get to the top and that girls are “socialized toward nursing” while boys are “socialized toward building bridges.”
The quote that killed him: “In the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are, in fact, lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.”
Big deal. But look at Summers bowing and scraping to the gods of political correctness:
As I said at our Tuesday meeting, if I could turn back the clock, I would have spoken differently on matters so complex. Though my NBER remarks were explicitly speculative, and noted that “I may be all wrong,” I should have left such speculation to those more expert in the relevant fields. I especially regret the backlash directed against individuals who have taken issue with aspects of what I said.
This is disgusting. Stand by what you said, man. Anyone who doesn’t know what boys and girls, on average, are interested in, shouldn’t be able to get a college degree. If you don’t know that, on average, girls score about the same as boys on math and science, but that there is more of a barbell distribution at the extremeties for boys, well now you do. But all this is beside the point.
Harvard should fire Summers because we live in a clarifying time, in which people and institutions should reveal themselves to be what they are, and it is about time that Harvard’s ideology became transparent, pellucid, crystaline. We’d fire him because he has no cojones.
(Photo of a girl who should be studying to get better grades on math and science via the Washington Post.)