Comments Elsewhere

“Actually he was a faculty member…. While he talked the talk, he also walked the walk and taught introductory seminars.”

Well, good for him; my bad at misrepresenting his position.

That said, the position that he was hounded out of was not his teaching of introductory seminars, but rather his position as CEO of the University, and the censure resolutions passed by faculty bodies concerned his “leadership” as an adminstrator, not his teaching or research. In point of fact, I notice that Harvard has been specifically invited to take a position as senior faculty if he wants it.

The substance of my comments stands.

“Summers was well within his rights to lead on this issue.”

It’s not his job as CEO to “lead” research “on this issue.” That’s a job for people who are paid to do research. In his role as a faculty member he would be well within the bounds of academic freedom. In his role as an administrator his “leadership” on substantive questions [of research] is at best intrusive micromanagement and at worst ignorant ranting. If he wants to “lead” research then he’ll be better able to do that now that he’s stepped down.”

“Ask any sociologist or anthropologist how much human biology matters to their work. To put on ideological blinders in research and then create purposely misleading research by not accounting for known factors is a akin to creating Ptolemiac epicycles in honor of false ideology.”

This is a serious distortion of the controversy over Summers’ remarks, in which Nancy Hopkins of MIT (who is a qualified scholar in biology, as Summers is not) played a substantial role. Nobody is suggesting that “human biology” doesn’t matter to sociology or anthropology; only that it doesn’t matter in the way that Larry Summers thinks it does. That said, I’m not concerned with settling that dispute, or the unrelated dispute with Cornell West that you invoke for some reason in the middle of a discussion of this other controversy.

The issue here isn’t whether Summers is wrong or right; it’s whether he deserves any special protections for public expressions of his views without any repercussions from faculty members who think he’s a jackass. If he were losing an academic position, then he would deserve it under principles of academic freedom. But there’s no such thing as “administrative freedom” in the University and there’s no reason why there should be. Too bad for Larry.