I was saddened to hear that Larry Summers had resigned as Harvard president. Some friends and I had been wondering how large a donation it was going to take to get Larry to change his name to “Professor Dumbledore” and the name of the school to “Hogwarts”. Now it may never come to pass 🙁
3 thoughts on “Larry Summers resigning the presidency of Harvard”
Comments are closed.
This is an unfortunate incident, and a great loss for Harvard. The main contention of Larry Summers, namely that there is a possible biological substrate contributing to the notable overrepresentation of men among science and math faculty in top-notch universities, is well-supported in the literature. There is robust evidence for greater male variability with respect to IQ, and the best population-representative data also reveal slightly higher IQs in men compared to women, on average. These factors dwarf other factors when it comes to explaining why the science and math faculty of top-ranked institutions mostly comprise of men.
Lars: Summers was doing a lot of stuff that was more controversial within the university than talking about why women aren’t smart enough to want to spend 15 years struggling with equations so that they can get a $32,000 per year job as a math post-doc. Summers was building a massive new campus on the other side of the river and planning to relocate some departments there (so of course they all hated him). Summers was trying to get some of the flakier humanities departments to explain why what they were doing was interesting. The guy taking over is Derek Bok, who presumably won’t be too motivated to change things because he was the one who established them 20 years ago.
It’s interesting, his efforts to clean up the Augean stables of humanities education really didn’t get too much press. Humanities reform is badly needed; what a shame he won’t be able to continue. (If you don’t know about the Augean stables, blame your humanities department)