Ed, back from the overeating feasts of Thanksgiving. And I see you have a couple more posts. Let me catch up, a bit.
First, on the Larry Summers story, I should not go on at length. I did that at the time on LindyBill's thread, so, if you wish, you could catch it over there. The short of it, however, is that well before the fabled incident you mention, Summers was in trouble with almost all the major constituencies at Harvard. Some support remained, most notably, Robert Rubin, the former Treasury Secretary, who was the most influential member of the governing board, whatever it's called at Harvard.
I gather from your sort of passing invocation of the Summers' resignation that you don't know the long and complicated history of Summers at Harvard before he left for public service and of his difficulties as president once he came back and before the incident you mention.
That incident was something of a flashpoint but certainly not enough to make a final step toward resignation. It did fall into a process of mobilizing the discontent in the faculty and elsewhere, but Summers easily got past that with several public and awkward apologies (much to be said here about the different roles of serious researcher and university president). Then, during the summer his problems with an economics colleague and a very large grant to work on Russian economic began to appear in the newspapers. And that, I suspect, was the final blow.
His gaffe at the conference was simply one of the many, many straws that finally did it.
As for your left/right brain theories, you do a very nice job of picturing them. As theories, without an explanatory base, they are much like Carol Gilligan's very famous book, In A Different Voice. She argued that women approached ethical issues quite differently from men. And based it on a mix of literary references, interviews with Harvard undergraduates, and some very powerful illustrations. It was very influential in great swaths of the academy.
If you are interested, here's the Amazon url: amazon.com
I recommend it. It hardly ran into PC problems. In fact, it's my impression it generated a good deal of research.
I thought there were two large problems with the argument, however. Her argument that men approached ethical issues as deductive, abstract, and rule oriented, while women approached them contextually, more inductively, and more with concrete human issues in mind, that argument struck me as clearly illustrating two different ethical approaches but not isomorphic with gender. It was fairly easy to see some men reasoning ethically as women and vice versa.
The second part of her argument that I argued against was that by placing it as a gender difference without any serious explanatory base, she was implying a biological source. As far as I know, she never clarified whether she was doing that or not.
But it's easy enough to argue that such reasoning differences are more likely grounded in different social locations than in gender itself. It's much more plausible.
Moreover, the best work in the sociobiology crowd, the ones who wish to argue for a genetic link to behaviors, argued, as recently as the middle 90s (haven't read the summaries of the literature since then) that, while they thought there were links, they doubted research could ever demonstrate them. There were simply too many problematic explanatory links between specific genetic structures and specific behaviors. I recall one of the better summary articles simply said that whether these behaviors were biologically based or social basis was a faith statement, at the present level of research, rather than a serious research conclusion.
As for the right/left brain arguments, I've never seriously read the literature on it, don't know whether they have established firm links between some sort of brain activity and ways of reasoning (terrible muddled term for serious social science research).
Your posting may get me interested in it. I thought I had left that stuff behind when I retired from the academy. Who knows. |
