You may have seen that Harvard prez Lawrence Summers is in the cookpot over comments he recently made on the subject of women in science and the reasons why they have not advanced as quickly as their male counterparts. Nobody has provided us with a transcript of his actual remarks, so we’re doing what we can to reconstruct them from the reports of those who were there.

After reading Summers’ comments in the CNN story linked above and seeing alleged scholar Naomi Wolf’s appearance on the Today Show this morning with Katie Couric (arguably the dimmest bulb in TV journalism, by the way), I’m very inclined to suspect that the whole debacle is one part misunderstanding and ten parts righteous PC indignation. I’m not going to dive into the whole issue too deeply until I have Summers’ remarks in hand, but I do see a dynamic taking shape here that I have seen before, and that’s what I want to comment on briefly.

Summers is an administrator who has to think about the very real problem of tenure and promotion at America’s foremost university, and with respect to science and tech faculty the fact that women are lagging behind, for whatever reason, has to be a major concern. So it sounds like he offered up three possible explanations for what could be going on – not endorsing the ideas, but putting them on the table – and it seems that one of the questions he posed was something along the lines of “are there innate differences between the genders that work against women in this process?” Shortly thereafter a number of appropriately offended types got up and huffed out of the room.

Well, there are innate differences between men and women – and this isn’t my opinion, it’s the verdict of a lot of good scholarship done by both male and female researchers. There are also a lot of socialized differences between men and women – we raise little boys and little girls differently, and sadly, a lot of little girls are steered away from science even though that’s where they belong. And women routinely find themselves faced with a variety of challenges that men never encounter. In addition to the obvious differences in the area of raising a family, it’s also true that men don’t have to confront the often profound sexism that pervades certain elements of scientific world (ask a female med student about gender relations in her field right after she finishes her surgery rotation, for instance). None of this means that women can’t be great scientists – we know this for a fact because there are legions of women out there right now who are great scientists. But the numbers game does not, at present, favor them. So I can understand why Summers would be inclined to put all the questions he can think of on the table. I would, too, were I in his shoes.

In the spirit of fair intellectual inquiry, you ask all the questions you can think of. A lot of times the answer might be “no,” and that might well be the answer here. Good – next question. That’s how scholarly inquiry is supposed to work. But that’s not what Ms. Wolf did this morning. She led with the suggestion that a man who asks these kinds of question might not be the right man to lead Harvard University. And, of course, Couric lacks the brains required to interrogate even the most obvious propositions, so had Wolf asserted that Summers was Satan incarnate Couric would have tilted her head and nodded sagely.

So to the point of what this entry is really about. If a research or policy question is posed, a scholar addresses the question. However, when a question is asked and you attack the person for asking it, you are not a scholar. You’re a politician. You are not about intellectual debate – you’re about squelching debate for political gain. You’re using, in this case, the threat of a “sexist” label to intimidate others away from an area you don’t want to talk about.

In the academic world, I can’t begin to emphasize how terrifying that threat can actually be. If somebody hangs “sexist” on you, or “racist,” or gods forbid, “conservative,” you may as well be a registered sex offender for all the chance you’re now going to have at tenure or promotion. Here’s how chilling the situation is – as I write this blog entry, I know full well that it could cost me tenure. If somebody who doesn’t like me or who disagrees with me chooses, he or she can print it out and save it, and some day as I sit in front of a tenure/promotion committee it could land on the table in front of me. Depending on the make-up of that committee, it might be construed as de facto evidence of my unfitness for university life, and I could be shown the door. Or, it might not hit the table at all – it might simply be distributed to the committee members anonymously, and I’d never know why my career was hijacked. Could happen – I know of cases where things even more sinister than this have happened, in fact. I can’t say that I believe this is likely, and hey, I always have the option of censoring myself when it comes to discussing touchy issues. But I speak as an academic who has, on at least one occasion in his career, fallen victim to this very dynamic, so yeah, it’s within the realm of possibility.

Bill Maher defines political correctness as “the elevation of sensitivity over the truth.” And this morning on the Today Show (why do I watch that incoherent crap in the first place, you ask? Well, there’s a value in knowing what kind of brain-eating crop the networks are using their substantial weight to sew in the “public mind”) we saw Katie Couric, the dumbest girl in the whole sorority, handing a microphone to a politican masquerading as a scholar.

The task facing Summers and every other research university president in the country just got harder. It’s tough enough fixing a dysfunctional system without having to beat the PC brownshirts back from your doorstep.