Lawrence Summers

Open letter to Dr. Lawrence Summers
President of Harvard University
with Commentary

Roy Lisker

Commentary

I was visiting in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the week of January 16,when Dr. Lawrence Summers made his comments about women's intellectual capacities and the uproar erupted. Here is my understanding of the situation on the basis of several items in the Boston Globe:

Dr.Summers had already made a name for himself as notably insensitive to racial and gender issues. The fact that the individuals he attacked often evidenced a homologous insensitivity does not exonerate him, but in certain instances one can give a measured approval of his motivation while deploring his methods.

Last week President Summers appeared as an invited speaker at a conference being held at Harvard on women and minorities in the sciences. He qualified his remarks by claimed to be speaking "as an economist, not as the president of Harvard". (One can imagine THE President, Mr. Bush, saying something like, "I'm not saying this as President of the United States, but speaking as an ordinary citizen I hate Arabs."!).That being said, he'd come prepared to address the issue of why there are ,relatively, so few women pursuing scientific careers. He listed 3 possible reasons:

  1. Women with children work 80 hour weeks and are too tired at the end of the day to pursue science. (Talk about fixed role models!)
  2. The reason that men perform better than women at standard exams in the sciences has "something to do with behavioral genetics". He went on to say that "many of the things attributed to socialization have a biological basis". He then presented what he apparently believed to be a paradigmatic example: he'd given his daughter two plastic trucks as Christmas presents. She named the big one "daddy" and the little one "baby". This for him was evidence of an innate maternal instinct.It was at this moment that Nancy Hopkins, a biologist from MIT, stood up and led a contingent of woman delegates out of the auditorium.
  3. He conceded that discrimination might play a role but thought that it's role was "not significant" in determining the distribution of men and women in the sciences.
Although the entire speech was taped , the Harvard administration has refused to release the transcript. The uproar has been enormous and many people are calling for Summers' resignation. Summers has since released numerous apologies, the latest of which can be read on Harvard's homepage. Even the American Mathematical Society has posted a rebuke to Summers on its homepage, and newspapers across the country are commenting on the issue.

(There is an ugly tone in many of the editorials and letters I've seen in local newspapers, including the New York Times: At last the debate is open! That is to say, we will now have a "realistic discussion" of the innate differences of men and women in mental capacity!)

Yesterday morning I composed and sent, via E-mail, the following letter to the Office of the President at Harvard:

Dear Doctor Summers: Having written brief biographies of several notable women in the history of mathematics, Sonya Kovalevskaya, Sophie Germain, Mary Fairfax Sommerville and Emilie du Chatelet, I can testify to the fact that the greatest obstacle to a career in mathematics, even for these supremely gifted women, has always been the obstinate stupidity of a male establishment determined at all cost to deny them a career in the areas most suited for their abilities.

Sonya Kovalevskaya was vilified across Europe for the audacity to assume a professorship in Sweden, a position she obtained only after years ot struggle, and after Russia had denied her even the privilege of teaching high school. Mary Fairfax Sommerville was forced into two marriages by a family that feared that the study of science and math might damage her delicate brain. It was only in her 40's, thanks to the presence of a relatively enlightened husband, that she was enabled to embark on a successful career as a scientist and translator. Sophie Germain was obliged to assume a masculine pseudonym in disseminating her research. In order to study she prevailed upon sympathetic male friends who took classroom notes for her and went over them with her afterwards.

The list goes on and on. There is no "debate" about the suitability of women's brains for scientific work. One would have believed that such silly notions had been eradicated over a century ago.

No doubt your overtly expressed sentiments are shared, (clandestinely), by many senior administrators in universities around the country. Bringing them out into the open may open up a frank revelation of how far we still have to go to reach what one would have believed to be an accomplished goal .

Sincerely Yours,
Dr. Roy Lisker
Ferment Magazine

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