More on Larry Summers

A really nice op-ed in the Dallas Morning Herald on the Larry Summers controversy at Harvard. Here's a quote on totalitarian ideology:

Of course, there is plenty of physiological and social-science evidence that the reality of gender is quite different from the ideological picture. Asserting that men and women are innately identical is, in strictly scientific terms, like asserting (as the Nazis did) that Jews are an inferior race or (as the Marxists did) that the history of the world can be explained as a process of class struggle.

Totalitarian ideology, however, is actively hostile to scientific inquiry and will seek to extirpate whatever scientific conclusions don't accord with it. In Stalin's Soviet Union, scientists went to the gulag for contesting Trofim Lysenko's rejection of Mendelian gene-based heredity, a rejection that was thoroughly unscientific but dovetailed nicely with the reigning Marxist effort to create a "new Soviet man" via collectivization and propaganda. Hitler's regime denounced both quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of relativity as "Jewish physics" designed to contaminate pure Aryan thinking.

Similarly, the American Sociological Association, in a clear rebuke to Larry Summers, issued a Lysenko-esque statement on March 8 declaring point-blank that "overriding social determinants," not "innate biological differences," provide "the most powerful explanation" why women are statistically overrepresented in some fields and underrepresented in others.

And her conclusion:

Wouldn't it be preferable, rather than pretending that the sexes are identical and interchangeable and blaming society for women's problems, to talk openly about men's and women's strengths and weaknesses (as groups, not as exceptional individuals) and explore rationally the reasons relatively few women seek scientific careers? The reasons probably range from slight variances between the sexes in the extremes of intellectual ability to the likelihood that some gifted girls find science and math just plain boring.

But don't count on that happening soon. The lesson that Larry Summers has taught us is that our academic and intellectual establishment is in the grip of a poisonous feminist ideology that will not tolerate open and rational discussion or genuine inquiry. Speak out, even in the gentlest possible way as Mr. Summers did, and you will have that entire establishment calling for your job.