Harvard Can Be a Riot

I met Harvard President Lawrence Summers when he was in the Clinton administration, and ever since then I’ve heard people telling him to tuck in his shirt, eat slowly and learn to suffer fools. I once suggested he should find a way to relate to his fellow man in other than the Socratic method.

I wish I’d also thought to press him on showing a little self-doubt. Summers is often the smartest man in the room (even those who hate him admit he’s brilliant), but a little humility would have come in handy in dealing with the Harvard faculty riot that followed the gender riot that followed a Jan. 14 Summers speech in which he speculated, sloppily, about why there aren’t more women in the top jobs in science and math. That speech has turned him into a target of opportunity for Harvard professors, some of whom don’t give a fig about women’s rights. A thumbs-up, thumbs-down vote on Summers will be taken tonight at a Harvard faculty meeting. The professors can’t fire him, but they can make his life miserable and put pressure on Harvard’s governing body to do more than issue bland statements of support.

Summers’ trouble started when he hypothesized (he had no prepared text) that a “different availability of aptitude at the high end” and 80-hour workweeks hurt women in science. He also said a lot of other things: how jobs break along male- female preferences even at gender-neutral kibbutzim, how his doll-free twin daughters labeled their toys “daddy trucks” and “baby trucks,” and how what he said was just a “guess.”

You might think such musings would be OK in the groves of academe, but you would be wrong, especially when it comes to the third rail of politics: gender equality. Besides, when you are as powerful and influential as any president of Harvard is, you had better vet your grocery list.

What Summers still may not get is how much free-floating anxiety women feel over the hundred slights we suffer in the workplace and the anger we generally hide about the males who benefit from, and sometimes inflict, those slights.

We’ve gotten some of what feminism asked for -- flextime, maternity leave, equal opportunity in university admissions, almost equal pay at almost equal jobs (at the entry level, at least) -- but we still face this indignity: If we start out with this much opportunity, when we don’t do as well as men later, it has to be our fault. Surveys show that young married men are putting in an hour longer a day on the domestic front than they used to, but until men jump with both feet onto the daddy track the way women jump onto the mommy track, we can’t and won’t compete with them evenly for the very top jobs. What’s more, we are supposed to shut up about it -- feminism is so yesterday, and whining is so whiny.

Which is my explanation for why the Summers affair has turned into such a huge deal. When women see a chance to publicly vent in a group about the injustice of our work lives, we jump on it. And we really go for broke when the perpetrator is likely to react. Bill O’Reilly didn’t attract this kind of mob.

Should Summers lose his job because he said something similar to what most of us say when the subject turns to women and work? Before that happens, we should consider this: He named three women as vice presidents and two as deans to the paltry list of female honchos at Harvard. And does anyone really believe that he isn’t aggressively competing with all the top universities for female professors of physics and chemistry?

In the same remarks that got him into trouble, he reiterated how important it is to root out discrimination and how unfair the mommy track is. He worried about employers who defy “legitimate family desires.” This doesn’t mean he didn’t also overreach. It does mean he’s not a pig who deserves to be run out of town.

For my money, what MIT professor Nancy Hopkins said after the speech did more to hurt women than Summers’ remarks. Hopkins had been in the room. “My heart was pounding and my breath was shallow,” she said. “I just couldn’t breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill.” If she hadn’t left, Hopkins said, she “would’ve either blacked out or thrown up.”

For goodness’ sake -- a return of the vapors. That’s not going to get us to the top.