Shame on the University of California...

Larry Summer should be an esteemed guest....

The regents had invited Summers to be the keynote speaker at a dinner tonight in Sacramento. They then uninvited him last week after some UC faculty protested that "inviting a keynote speaker who has come to symbolize gender and racial prejudice in academia conveys the wrong message to the university community and to the people of California."

What did Summers, a distinguished economist and a liberal Democrat who served in the Clinton administration, do to deserve such obloquy? In 2005, he suggested that it's worth researching whether, among other factors, innate differences between men and women may play a role in the greater prominence of men in the sciences -- a hypothesis that has some support in the relevant scientific literature.

Summers desperately tried to make amends, issuing an abject apology for even raising the subject. Nevertheless, and despite strong support for him among Harvard students, he was drummed out of the Harvard presidency by the Cambridge academic equivalent of a lynch mob.

Apparently his sins against feminist orthodoxy were so grave that he's still not welcome to give so much as a dinner speech to the UC Board of Regents more than two years later.

The hostility to Summers reflects the growing influence of professors who see their primary mission not as advancing human knowledge but as promoting a "progressive" political agenda.