Lawrence Summers is an outspoken former Treasury secretary and current president of Harvard University who made news recently at an economics conference for having ventured the heretical opinion that women are not generally found in the top tier of the mathematical sciences because the female genome simply doesn't churn out mathematical geniuses at the rate that the male genome does.
Well, this was a completely uncontroversial comment as far as the yokels out here in JesusLand were concerned, but in the Northeast, where there are certain taboos which cultured liberals simply do not violate, one might have thought that the Harvard president had called for the establishment of a campus chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. One of his listeners, a faint-hearted MIT biology professor by the name of Nancy Hopkins, reported that she had to leave the room, so close was she to collapsing in a swoon, an admission that probably didn't earn her any style points with feminists.
President Summers, like Galileo, was hauled before an Inquisition of "Progressive Opinion" and forced to abjectly recant his heresy and to promise never, ever to transgress the bounds of acceptable liberal opinion again. If he had said that women were smarter than men, a male eyebrow or two might have been raised, but the world would scarcely have taken notice. As it was, he didn't get the catechism quite right and was forced to meekly offer profuse and ignominious apologies for having violated the orthodoxies of political correctness. And this at a premier American university, no less, where one might presume that unpopular minority opinions might be cherished.
Caught up in the mob hysteria surrounding the event, few media commentators could be bothered to wonder whether Summers was, in fact, right about what he said, but then truth does not occupy a very lofty perch on the liberal totem pole. Thankfully, however, Judith Kleinfeld has come forward with the pertinent scholarship which, it turns out, supports what everybody knew but no one, least of all president Summers, would say, which is that he was essentially correct.
Viewpoint sides with Stephen Pinker on this one. When Pinker, the Harvard psychologist who argues that significant innate differences exist between men and women, was asked by The Harvard Crimson whether Mr. Summers's remarks were within the pale of legitimate academic discourse, he said, "Good grief, shouldn't everything be within the pale of legitimate academic discourse, as long as it is presented with some degree of academic rigor?"