Summers Off
Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers is a brilliant economist, the son of two distinguished economists and the nephew of two Nobel Prize winners in economics. His very existence raises the question of whether scholarly success might have a genetic component. Unfortunately, Summers asked this question last weekend at a Harvard conference on the shortage of women in the academic fields of math and science. While he was at it, he also asked whether the careers of women with families suffered because they were less likely than men to work 80 hours a week.
If there is a gene for controversy, Summers has got that one too. He is congenitally unable to suppress interesting thoughts. This ought to be an asset in academia, and during Summers’ early career as an economist, it probably was. Then he went to the Clinton Treasury Department and learned from Secretary Robert Rubin (the acknowledged master) the power of being uninteresting. Thus transformed, he succeeded Rubin as Treasury secretary and then was anointed president of Harvard. Whereupon his tact transplant seems to have failed. The current kerfuffle is only the latest in a series.
Is Summers a victim of campus political correctness or of his own ego?
Universities ought to be places where willingness to engage with disagreeable ideas, or just shrug them off, is stronger than in the rest of society. Instead, they often seem from afar to be hotbeds of sensitivity, though desperately short of reasons to take offense. When one comes along, the locals pounce on it like a pallet of food dropped into a famine.
Although there is no transcript, it is reported that Summers’ controversial thrusts took the form of questions. As on “Jeopardy,” this is important. The span of toleration for questions ought to be especially wide.
That said, no topic justifies caution and tact more than the role of genes in human destiny. Few ideas have done, and still do, so much harm. The topic should not be beyond bounds. But it is not self-censorship or political correctness for a college president to avoid raising the issue of genetic determinism casually in a public forum, without careful forethought. (And wasn’t one of those parents a distinguished woman economist?)
The more revealing part of Summers’ questions was whether domestic and child-care duties disadvantage women in the career race. Surely this familiar point could be made in a way that the most ardent feminist would agree with. The trouble is that if any career path offers smart people status without expecting them to work 80 hours a week, it is academia. Probably no profession is easier to combine with raising a family. You even get your summers off.
A college president dwells partly in the world of intellectual inquiry, where the pursuit of knowledge should not be hindered by roadblocks, and partly in worlds with different values. He or she is the academic world’s ambassador to these crasser climes and must be willing to practice diplomacy, hypocrisy, baloney -- whatever it takes -- so that his or her institution can flourish free of such real-world vices. If Summers has lost his appetite for tact, he can return to the classroom.
