Changing the guard at Harvard.

• Author: Gottfried, Paul
• Position: Articles
• Pages: 62(7)

In March 2005 the Harvard faculty of arts and sciences did something that was unprecedented. It passed a motion overwhelmingly expressing lack of confidence in Harvard President Lawrence Summers. Although a self-proclaimed Democrat and Jewish liberal, Summers had committed an act so outrageous that female members of his faculty stated they had been on the point of fainting when they learned of it. An outraged feminist professor of ethics with an appropriately multicultural name, Mahzarin Banaji, told the Harvard Crimson: "In this day and age to believe that men and women differ in their basic competence for math and science is as insidious as believing that some people are better suited to be slaves than masters."

Summers' inexcusable sin was to have included a speculative aside in a speech delivered a few weeks earlier about a possible genetic difference between the sexes that would account for why men dominated the top five per cent of mathematical aptitude tests. While both Harvard professors and the feminist faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pouted and fumed, several reports in the impeccably liberal New York Times offered the speculative hypothesis that Summers had hinted at about gender differences and scientific testing. The NYT presented the tested supposition about gender and intelligence as a reasonable inference drawn from an objective survey. But Summers would have done better to accept the politically correct view of his faculty: Gender, he should have made clear, is a social construct; and if women do not achieve scores as high as those of as men on scientific tests, that can be ascribed to systemic prejudice. The same systemic prejudice is the cause of the disparity in test results for different races. In fact, all human differences are allegedly attributable to the lingering effects of oppression, which government social policy, if applied broadly and persistently enough, will eventually wipe out.

Although Summers grovelled before his faculty, he was ultimately pushed into resigning. He had trespassed against the holiest of his faculty's doctrines by calling into question their egalitarian, environmentalist worldview. In a real sense he had also challenged the ideological core of the current academic world, one that swears undying allegiance to "diversity". This goes back to the creedal faith in the essential sameness of everyone, from which it can be inferred that human differences are socially caused and mirror the nearness or distance from Western cultural, male, white imperialism. The exotica we are asked to celebrate does not contradict the tenet of human homogeneity. In fact, it seeks to reduce everyone who comes under its influence to the same language about victims and victimisers and to rote repetition of the platitudes learned in "diversity training".

But this new orthodoxy has brought in its wake the acceleration if not initiation of certain trends in college admission and hiring. Unlike Harvard in 1908, the same university a century later can point to an ethnic and lifestyle multifariousness among its faculty and students that would not have been conceivable a hundred years ago. This transformed Harvard boasts of the presence of Russian Jews, Irish Catholics, blacks, Asians, lesbians, and other categories of people who would not in all cases have been happily received at the same institution as students, let alone as faculty members, in an earlier age.

But this is at most a half-truth. There were Sephardic and German Jews, Genoese Catholics, affluent blacks like the young William Dubois, and Asians who attended Harvard in 1908 and some even earlier. It is simply erroneous to believe that the sometimes anxious reaction of some New England or Virginia patricians to the massive immigration of the early 20th century had marked their behaviour throughout time. It is not the case that everything in the Ivy League, as one of my graduate school classmates once pontificated, that has now been opened to inclusiveness used to be closed off. From all statistical accounts, Harvard's undergraduates are at the present time mostly Jewish and Asian. The Jewish presence at Harvard was 9 per cent in 1900, but it rose to 24...