<br>
<blockquote> <p>The faculty is hired help. Summer's is only in trouble if he ticks the trustees or the alumni off - which he may or may not have done.>></p> </blockquote>
<br>
<p>The faculty has tenure. Summers does not.</p>
<p>[hope i don't get roasted]</p>
<p>If there is one place in the world you cannot casually speak your mind (other than perhaps Saudi Arabia or the Bush White House) it is certainly in American Universities. Unless of course you are regurgitating the latest fashion in academia, or if what you're saying is an undisputed scientific fact. If the verdict is still out, clothe your words in the latest style.</p>
<p>I myself have no idea whether or not there are absolute gender differences (unless of course they are feminine-friendly or sexual-orientation friendly--these are, if not given at least acceptable).</p>
<p>Imagine if RW Emerson were alive and pres of Harvard (i know he wasn't president, but I believe he was a trustee) and he spoke up as he was prone to, and controversially as he was prone to. Summers should take heart.</p>
<p>Apparently, to be a University head you need to have no specific head of your own; you need to be a technocrat. Summers has failed miserably as such. This all should have fueled intellectual debate; instead it has stayed within the strict confines of political debate.</p>
<p>I think Summers is more likely to be wrong in his positions of gender-tenure, if we keep restrict things to genetics alone. </p>
<p>As I understand it, this conference was to be private and by invitation only so as to allow everyone to speak their minds. One of the participants decided it should be otherwise and called a reporter.</p>
<p>Intellectual integrity?</p>
<p>"I didn't find Summers comment about undergrad teaching harsh. I think it was simply a frank statement about the institutional mission of large research universities"</p>
<p>Where in the harvard mission statement does it state that research takes a priority over undergaduates? I missed that part.</p>
<p>alphacdc,</p>
<p>Perhaps they should add it, and also add this "fact" to the myriad promotional mailings they send out--our house was flooded. We received at least 5 high-gloss booklets over the last 6 months. I don't recall them saying that undergrads take a backseat to Grads, or that Harvard is know for its lack of communication between student/faculty.</p>
<p>Trascript of Speech</p>
<p>"Perhaps they should add it, and also add this "fact" to the myriad promotional mailings they send out--our house was flooded. We received at least 5 high-gloss booklets over the last 6 months. I don't recall them saying that undergrads take a backseat to Grads, or that Harvard is know for its lack of communication between student/faculty."</p>
<p>They don't have to, they are Harvard!</p>
<p>To be fair, really, when we visited, the director of the undergraduate program for my d.'s major told her that point-blank, in no uncertain terms. He stated unequivocally that the person she wanted to work with only taught graduate students, and that only in alternate years, and, no, she couldn't meet with him (either on the visit, or after she got there.) We were very grateful for his honesty.</p>
<p>I don't think it is fair to criticize Harvard for what they are not, unless they advertise otherwise.</p>
<p>To be honest, Harvard IS a RESEARCH university. While they have an undergraduate school, their GRADUATE school (or schools/departments) hold the bulk of the student population. Everyone goes to Harvard for that graduate degree. lol</p>
<p>Mini,</p>
<p>I remember sitting in a parochial school in uptown Manhattan and listening to Harvards director of admissions answer a question from the audience about who gets admitted. </p>
<p>She said her daughter had an 1110 SAT, and she wanted to know if her daughter had a reasonable shot at admissions to Harvard and should she therefore apply. Of course he assured her that it was reasonable, coated with a lot of pabulum about how Harvard looks at the applicant as more than just a test score. You could here muttering throughout the auditorium. Moreover, she herself was white and thus not a URM and she stated that her daughter was well rounded etc but not an athlete or musician, after which he drove the point home even further. On the way out you could see the excitement in her conversation with her daughter. I assume it was over her reasonable shot at Harvard. My wife wanted to go talk to her but I couldnt bring myself to do it.</p>
<p>Besides, with an endowment like harvard's, they can probably live through the criticism.</p>
<p>Oh, but that's the admissions office - we expect THEM to, ahem, "market". ;)</p>
<p>With the attitude of Harvard's president, I'm frankly surprised that they even accept applications from women.</p>
<p>Sounds to me like he feels Harvard lowered its standards when it recently went co-ed.</p>
<p>Well, I read Harvard Pres' talk, and it seemed very reasonable to me. The only part I was troubled about was his talk of sex based aptitude in science and engineering - he was using hypothetical numbers. I'd be interested to see what the actual scores are of males/vs. females those areas. (I know males have larger percentage of high scores on SATII maths...) But he wasn't stating that women or a woman, couldn't have a higher aptitude than a man or men, but that the numbers show there are more men than women scoring higher, and that perhaps it shows more natural aptitude - again, looking at the total population, not at individuals. And everything else he said made sense with my experience and what I've read and observed.</p>
<p>Yeah interesteddad, Clarence Thomas as next Harvard president. About as likely as Dan Rather taking the job of W's White House press secretary.</p>
<p>marite - at most schools the president is on the faculty and does have tenure. Since Summers teaches courses at Harvard I presume he has a faculty appointment as well.</p>
<p>mini - what you mean all those Nobel prize winners don't teach Rocks for Jocks to freshmen? Whoda thunk it!</p>
<p>Anxiousmom:</p>
<p>Don't you think a more perceptive analysis from Summers might have included the fact that Harvard hires professors with PhDs from Ivy League universities and Ivy League universities enroll predominantly Ivy League undergrads and, until just a few years ago, Ivy League undergrad schools refused to accept women?</p>
<p>Makes it kind of hard to have a large cohort of tenured women professors, doesn't it?</p>
<p>IMO, Summers was a generation too late. He would have made a perfect President back when Harvard was literally an old boy's club. He and the Trustees and the faculty could have all sat around smoking cigars and laughing at the foolish notion that women could be smart enough for book-learning.</p>
<p>I don't really know anything about him as a person - maybe he is sexist - and maybe he isn't. But it seemed to me that he was acknowledging many different theories to explain a practical problem; there ain't a lot of women at top-level teaching or in top-level research positions. And he didn't subscribe to any of them - other than to say that it was worth looking at the research in all these areas. As for the "cohort of tenured women professors", he did address the fact that given the number of women in engineering/science classes years ago, one would expect to find more in these positions now. Something or things caused them to drop out of this loop - and all the issues need to be looked out to find out why! I consider myself to be a feminist liberal, and I had no problem with anything that he said.
[quote]
Don't you think a more perceptive analysis from Summers might have included the fact that Harvard hires professors with PhDs from Ivy League universities and Ivy League universities enroll predominantly Ivy League undergrads and, until just a few years ago, Ivy League undergrad schools refused to accept women?
[/quote]
And I agree with you - yup, he could have added that to the mouthful he already said - but he was covering a lot of ground and touching on a lot of different issues.</p>
<p>I take huge issue with using SAT as a gauge of aptitude - more accurately, assuming that women are mentally deficient because of a small point discrepancy. There are so very many other factors to consider. The SAT is also a test of confidence. If more women take the test, their average scores might be lower. </p>
<p>Furthermore, the exact same standards could be used to determine that African Americans are less intelligent than whites - when you standardize for income and parental education, blacks score lower on the SAT. If you believe that the slight point discrepancy between men and women is important and indicitive of a lack of native talent, you would have to believe that there are significant and substantial differences between races. I, for one, cannot and will not believe that - can it really be coincidence that it was once legal in this country for both of those groups to be considered property? </p>
<p>Here is a link to an article (NY Times), with relevant portion quoted below:
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/24/science/24women.html?ex=1107592086&ei=1&en=d745976bfb15f4e3%5B/url%5D">http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/24/science/24women.html?ex=1107592086&ei=1&en=d745976bfb15f4e3</a></p>
<p>"In adolescence, though, some differences in aptitude begin to emerge, especially when it comes to performance on standardized tests like the SAT. While average verbal scores are very similar, boys have outscored girls on the math half of the dreaded exam by about 30 to 35 points for the past three decades or so. </p>
<p>Nor is the masculine edge in math unique to the United States. In an international standardized test administered in 2003 by the international research group Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to 250,000 15-year-olds in 41 countries, boys did moderately better on the math portion in just over half the nations. For nearly all the other countries, there were no significant sex differences. </p>
<p>But average scores varied wildly from place to place and from one subcategory of math to the next. Japanese girls, for example, were on par with Japanese boys on every math section save that of "uncertainty," which measures probabilistic skills, and Japanese girls scored higher over all than did the boys of many other nations, including the United States. </p>
<p>In Iceland, girls broke the mold completely and outshone Icelandic boys by a significant margin on all parts of the test, as they habitually do on their national math exams. "We have no idea why this should be so," said Almar Midvik Halldorsson, project manager for the Educational Testing Institute in Iceland."</p>
<p>Many women who have Ph.D.s in life sciences and engineering are turned off by the unfriendly and sexist environment in academe.</p>
<p>i don't mean to offensive or anything. but something i have noticed in general at the private school i go to is that usually the girls are the best english and art students while boys tend to excel more at math and science. this could just be my school.</p>
<p>Anxiousmom - there is attrition throughout engineering; men are more likely to continue and get more degrees. I'm part of that attrition statistic because of sexism. 15% of engineering students are female; most of the faculty are male; most of the engineers are male. Furthermore, people actually believe that b.s. that men are "more spacial" than women. I'm darn sure that I'm good in math because it was expected of me and there was no other way to be - growing up, my dad always thought that I was good in math. Fast-forward to high school, and, without studying, first try, I got an 800 on the math SAT. Lots of encouragement in high school (and middle school) from teachers. Fast-forward to college, and some professors were good, whereas some were plainly favouring the men. After a few medical nightmares, my grades slipped - and a professor asked me if I wasn't doing well because "* don't think... does [my] mind work properly?" No - try organic chem + thermo + EE + math + a few other courses + breast tumor = academic crash in anyone. </p>
<p>Not much that could convince me to return for more engineering school.</p>
<p>Patuxent:</p>
<p>Yes, Summers has tenure as prof, but not as president.</p>
<p>Anxiousmom, I'm with you on this one. Speaking as a professional woman with a daughter who's a math/science whiz, I think this whole thing is ridiculous. Summers is in trouble simply because he's been shaking the cage up there at Harvard for the last few years, and it's about time someone did it. This brouhaha is simply the best shot the sclerotics on the faculty can fire back at him, and I think it's as transparent as can be. I hope he hangs in there.</p>