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Summers Is Not Worthy
Former Clinton Treasury Secretary, Harvard President and John Bates Clark medal winner Lawrence Summers is declared unfit to address the regents of UC Santa Clara.
You gotta love campus Leftists and their gender police, tolerant to a fault.
You gotta love campus Leftists and their gender police, tolerant to a fault.
posted by Spencerblog at
12:51 PM
2 Comments:
I sometimes wonder if these anti-Summers people have any reasoning ability whatsoever, or if they are guided strictly by emotion.
According to Wikipedia, "[i]n January 2005, Summers suggested, at a National Bureau of Economics Research (NBER) Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce, the possibility that many factors outside of socialization could explain why there were more men than women in high-end science and engineering positions. He suggested one such possible reason could be men's higher variance in relevant innate abilities or innate preference."
Is that such a preposterous notion? "Influential psychologist Steven Pinker defended the legitimacy of Summers' January remarks. When asked if Summers' remarks were 'within the pale of legitimate academic discourse,' Pinker responded 'Good grief, shouldn’t everything be within the pale of legitimate academic discourse, as long as it is presented with some degree of rigor? That’s the difference between a university and a madrassa. [...] There is certainly enough evidence for the hypothesis to be taken seriously.'"
But apparently to some people, anything that threatens their insistence on complete and utter equality of innate ability between the sexes is "beyond the academic pale," and that's a bad reflection on them, not Summers.
It's unfortunate that Summers felt compelled to accommodate such idiocy and apologize. It reminds me of two incidents that occurred when I was in law school at Penn.
In the first, a noted and distinguished professor of criminal law was chastised by a handful of female first-years who thought that his eyebrow had arched just a little too high when he gave the female victim's account of a rape, implying -- to them -- that he didn't believe her. He actually apologized to the entire class the next day for something he hadn't even done (and then he had to suffer the additional indignity of being chastised by me, for cowing to such idiocy!).
In the second instance, our torts professor said something about "going from here to Timbuktu." She was formally chastised by the Black Law Students Association for "demeaning a center of ancient African learning and culture." She too apologized.
Go figure.
Liberals are children.
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