Fw: Furor Lingers as Harvard Chief Gives Details of Talk on Women

Furor Lingers as Harvard Chief Gives Details of Talk on Women

By PATRICK D. HEALY and SARA RIMER

Published: February 18, 2005

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Feb. 17 - Bowing to intense pressure from his faculty, the president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers, on Thursday released a month-old transcript of his contentious closed-door remarks about the shortage of women in the sciences and engineering. The transcript revealed several provocative statements by Dr. Summers about the "intrinsic aptitude" of women, the career pressures they face and discrimination within universities.

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Dr. Summers's remarks, which have only been described by others until now, have fueled a widening crisis on campus, with several professors talking about taking a vote of no confidence on the president next week. - That idea alone is unprecedented at Harvard in modern times.

Among his comments to a conference of economists last month, according to the transcript, Dr. Summers, a former secretary of the United States Treasury, compared the relatively low number of women in the sciences to the numbers of Catholics in investment banking, whites in the National Basketball Association and Jews in farming.

He theorized that a "much higher fraction of married men" than married women were willing to work 80-hour weeks to attain "high powered" jobs. He said racial and sex discrimination needed to be "absolutely, vigorously" combated, yet he argued that bias could not entirely explain the lack of diversity in the sciences. At that point, the Harvard leader suggested he believed that the innate aptitude of women was a factor behind their low numbers in the sciences and engineering.

"My best guess, to provoke you, of what's behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon - by far - is the general clash between people's legitimate family desires and employers' current desire for high power and high intensity; that 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," Dr. Summers said, according to the transcript.

"I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong, because I would like nothing better than for these problems to be addressable simply by everybody understanding what they are, and working very hard to address them," he added.

Over and over in the transcript, he made clear that he might be wrong in his theories, and he challenged researchers to study his propositions.

He also urged research on "the quality of marginal hires" to the faculty when efforts to diversify are under way. Do these hires, he asked, eventually turn into star professors? Or "plausible compromises" that are not unreasonable additions to the faculty? And "how many of them are what the right-wing critics of all of this suppose represent clear abandonments of quality standards?"

Several professors said Thursday that they were only more furious after reading his precise remarks , saying they felt he believed women were intellectually inferior to men.

Everett I. Mendelsohn, a professor of the history of science at Harvard, said that once he read the remarks, he could understand why Dr. Summers "might have wanted to keep it a secret."

"Where he seems to be off the mark particularly is in his sweeping claims that women don't have the ability to do well in high-powered jobs," said Professor Mendelsohn, who was one of a group of faculty members who sharply criticized Dr. Summers's leadership at a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on Tuesday. "There's an implication that they've taken themselves out of that role. But he brings forward no evidence."

But Dr. Summers seemed to back away from those theories on Thursday in a letter to the faculty released with the 7,000-word transcript. In it, he said he should "have spoken differently on matters so complex," and he said he had "substantially understated the impact of socialization and discrimination."

"The issue of gender difference is far more complex than comes through in my comments," he said in the letter.

The senior member of Harvard's governing corporation, James Houghton, released a letter shortly after the transcript was made public, offering praise and support for Dr. Summers.