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To: LindyBill who wrote (101099)	2/18/2005 9:12:46 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793843

The Corner - RE: SUMMERS [Stanley Kurtz] Jonah, I’ve now read the transcript of the Summers talk, although not yet the Q & A. I agree with you that the campaign against Summers is an outrageous inquisition. Summers’s talk is very thoughtful. It makes a perfectly reasonable case that biology might play a role in career choice. Summers has been attacked for using the weak anecdotal example of his daughters’ reaction to toy trucks, but he in fact invokes a number of important arguments for a biological role in sex differences¬the Israeli kibbutz experience, separated twin studies, our changing views on the causes of autism, and divergent career outcomes in spite of a growing pool of women with graduate educations in mathematics and engineering. All of these arguments can be challenged, and Summers’s admits that. But if it is illegitimate even to put this sort of argument forward, then free speech at Harvard is a thing of the past. Something else emerges from these transcripts that I think helps to explain this whole flap. I don’t doubt that those who are complaining about Summers are infuriated at biological explanations. But it’s pretty clear from this transcript that their deeper goal is to get rid of Summers because he is asking too many uncomfortable questions about the way affirmative action works. In this talk, Summers calls for research on whether affirmative action does what it claims to do. Do diversity searches really find top quality professors who were only being overlooked because they are minorities, or do these searches only yield professors of middling or low quality? Summers also points out contradictions in what diversity advocates are asking for. Some of them want faculty picked on purely objective criteria like number of papers published. This will supposedly eliminate subtle hiring discrimination. But other diversity advocates want the opposite. They call for choosing minority candidates based on subjective considerations like potential and collegiality, supposedly to overcome the discrimination built into “objective” criteria. Summers asks, which is it? He also wants data to back up the choice of strategy. So in this talk, Summers is subtly but clearly exposing the contradictions and secrets of the campus diversity industry. By calling for objective proof that diversity searches really produce faculty equal in quality to color blind or sex blind searches, Summers is laying out a standard that he knows diversity proponents can’t meet. And the contradictory criteria thrown up by diversity advocates are just different ways of getting to the numbers they want. By calling for objective studies of which strategy actually works, Summers is exposing the failings and contradictions of the whole diversity enterprise. I think this is the deeper reason why Summers is in trouble. His pro-affirmative action opponents can’t openly condemn him for asking these questions, so they’ve focused on the biology issue instead.