The Summers of Our Discontent

Poor Larry Summers. The President of Harvard really put his foot in it this time. He dared to suggest that innate differences between females and males make it more likely for little girls to want to play with Barbie and Ken and little boys to want to play with Tonka trucks. What a bastard!

This is not the first time Summers has been in trouble for being impolitic. Honestly, with views like that I don't how: 1) he got the job 2) he keeps his job. Summers, if I am not mistaken, was a member of the uber PC Clinton administration. He served as this nation's treasury secretary during the period when the federal budget was balanced and eventually slid into surplus territory. Clearly he was one of Bill Clinton's most successful appointees. Apparently male chauvinism is not detrimental to doing a good job balancing the books. But c'mon Larry you're on campus now!

I knew there was a reason I liked this man.

For starters let's see what he said that makes him a hero to me and goat to academia. He spoke at a conference called - Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce: Women, Underrepresented Minorities, and their S. & E. Careers. He put forth the notion that perhaps the reason women are so under represented in science and engineering was an innate or natural ability of boys to do well in these areas of study at a younger age that limits the pool of women candidates for these jobs later in life. Young girls do not apparently find science and engineering all that interesting. Makes a lot of sense to me. I know a few women who majored in mathematics in college but almost none that majored in chemistry, science or engineering. Correct me if I'm wrong but choosing a major is a voluntary act, right? I am willing to accept that fathers and boyfriends and even mothers might try to steer their daughters away from hard science degrees out a sense of protection or what have you, but I doubt any university in this day and age would deny a young women entry into these programs.

Simple common sense indicates that in general there are things that men tend to do better than women and things that women tend to do better than men. Why is this even controversial? The better question may be - why is there so little common sense in academia?

HERE NOW, THE TRUTH

The real issue here has nothing to do with the lack of women in these fields. It has to do with an agenda that has been foisted on this country since the 1970's. The agenda that wants us to believe that there are no differences between the abilities of men and women. This is so patently false that a 3-year old can root out the truth. Why is this even allowed to be debated?

This has nothing to do with relative intelligence levels between men and women, but it does have a lot to do with physiology. A quick view at the naked form of a young woman and a young man clearly demonstrates this point. Our two genders are not only different on the outside but on the inside as well. The brain, one of the organs largely imbued with the intelligence quotent (the buttocks being the other, oddly, we quite often hear people telling morons to get their heads out of their assess during our evening commute. Go figure) are actually quite different in the way they are physically wired. There are internal organs that women have that men don't. These physiological differences not only manifest themselves in the way men and women handle logical and measurable tasks but also in the way we handle soft tasks that require empathy and compassion. By and large these differences are what makes humanity whole. Why can't academia and the so-called womens movement simply embrace these truths and be proud of what woman excel at and be accepting of what men excel at?

Political Correctness is not funny anymore, it is dangerous. The sooner we stand up and support people like Larry Summers and Bill Cosby and all the other neanderthals who speak the truth regardless of who it offends the sooner we can end the tyranny of the PC police.

CW