I’ve no idea what you mean at all. Please elaborate on this metaphor.
Is denial of potential problems in the existing use of language not an equal worry?
Both of those motions passed, or at least, thats how I read it.
What? how was he part of the PC establishment? Does being an academic automatically make you part of the establishment? As far as I can tell, he never had much to do with PC issues until his speech so the PC establishment pretty much ignored him. It was only after he made the remark that the furor started. If you want another example, take a look at EO Wilson, who had to be regularly escorted around campus by security whenever he gave presentations because his views didn’t jibe with the “PC establishment”.
You’re right. Clearly I haven’t recovered from work last week. Still, I don’t read the motions as “almost forced to resign.”
See ITR Champion’s post.
Wikipedia notes he’d angered the left a number of times. He made some sarcastic comments about pollution (“Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of dirty industries to the LDCs [less developed countries]?”
…
“I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to it.”
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“I’ve always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City.”), opposed divestment from Israel, criticized Cornell West, and supports globalization.
The only thing I can figure is he means:
If you talk about the free market in a roomful of people that I’m defining as people who object to the free market, you’ll find that they object to what you’re talking about. Oh, the humanities!
Daniel
Yeah, sorry; I re-read the full transcript before heading out for the evening, and you’re quite right - the truck anecdote was complete rubbish, and attempting to make a bizarre point. And sorry about the subscription-only link; I’ve got a subscription but there’s no way to tell which articles are restricted without logging out and back in.
I fully agree now that the truck analogy was badly misplaced, but the fact remains that he was publically censured and effectively shouted down for presenting innate differences as one of three possible hypotheses explaining the under-representation of women in high-level academia, the other two being recruitment bias and social conditioning. I disagree with his prioritisation of those hypotheses, I dislike the example he used, but they are, nonetheless, the three main possible reasons for gender misrepresentation, and at no point did he present his opinion as definitive. If, at a scientific conference, one is not even allowed to consider the possibility that the explanation might not be totally bias, then what is the purpose of the conference in the first place? Science is supposed to be data-driven, and before you point out that Summers did not present data of his own (and I agree he did not, although he did refer to several respectable studies), I should note that he was specifically invited to the conference as someone outside the field intended to stimulate debate. This was about starting a dialogue, and if that dialogue starts with someone making a statement that is wrong, then correct it - don’t storm out and insist that the person making it be sacked.
That’s kinda funny. I’m a guy, and I did the same thing when I was a little kid with my toy AT-AT and my toy AT-ST.
Well, what I meant was, someone using it straight-faced, not just as a joke.
No, I understood what you meant. I’m just not sure ad writers, especially for toys, exist in the same reality we do, so I don’t know if anything they say counts as serious. 
What he was censured for, AFAICT, was not merely “presenting innate differences as one of three possible hypotheses”, but rather for giving very slipshod arguments in favor of the innate-differences hypothesis.
There’s a very good case to be made for keeping an open mind about any gender-unequal outcomes, and insisting that we need to do rigorous study before we present any conclusions about them as “scientific”. And to give Summers his due, the impression I get from the complete transcript of his remarks is that that’s the case he wanted to make.
Unfortunately (and rather shockingly, in an academic of Summers’ high standing), as I said, he did an absolutely piss-poor job of making it. After initially claiming that he was going to talk about the subject of gender disparities in a strictly positive rather than a normative way, without clouding the issue with judgemental assumptions, he went on to offer a bunch of half-assed arguments in support of the “innate-differences” idea, simply chock-full of normative judgements.
The lousy quality of his reasoning definitely gave the impression that he was just prejudiced against the “socialization” and “selection-bias” hypothesis and was grasping at straws in an effort to discredit them. I think, as I said, that what he was trying to do was something different. But it’s his own fault for screwing it up so badly.
If a dialogue starts out with a non-expert making a statement that’s not just wrong, but ill-informed, misleading, and illogical, it’s definitely a reasonable reaction to lose faith in that non-expert’s judgement in general. If a scientific conference about evolution, say, included remarks from a highly-placed non-scientist administrator who was trying to argue for scientific openness, but stupidly included a bunch of half-baked and debunked claims from Intelligent Design advocates, you would rightly expect the conference participants to be shocked and disgusted.
Even a non-expert speaking informally in a serious academic setting should adhere to some minimum standard of coherence and intellectual rigor. And when it’s the president of Harvard University, we have a right to expect that that “minimum standard” will be pretty damn high. Summers completely failed to achieve it, IMO, and he deserves to be embarrassed for it.
(That doesn’t mean, of course, that I endorse every criticism of Summers made in the course of the controversy: as I noted before, there are always some ill-informed exaggerators on both sides.)
Let me try to explain my view on the Summers case. Was he “publicly censured”? Yes, by the Haravard faculty. Was he “effectively shouted down”? Well that’s debatable but certainly the response he got will not encourage anyone else to publicly advance the same notion about gender differences on Harvard’s campus.
Does this prove that the complaints about politically correct thuggery tolerance are valid? Hardly. “Tolerance” does not mean that every single person is free from criticism. It doesn’t even mean that every single person is free from strict criticism. A tolerant society where people have disagreements, even high-intensity disagreements. But people in a tolerant society can live side-by-side with people they disagree with, can work with people they disagree with, can interact with those they disagree with and treat everybody with respect. Harvard University is a bastion of political correctness, yes. Yet Larry Summers, who disagrees strongly with most people at Harvard about a lot of important things, still works there and lives there and does his job effectively there. Ergo Harvard is a tolerant place.
As yourself whether a comparable situation could develop at other institutions. Would the military accept a high-ranking general who says that the Iraq War is illegal and immoral? Would the Soutern Baptist Church accept a leader who favors gay marriage? Would Exxon-Mobil accept a CEO who’s strongly pro-environment? No and no and no.
But universities are not meant to be bastions of PC thought, they’re meant to be acadamies that foster free intellectual discourse. In this case, it failed miserably because the entire thing descended into slander and ranting rather than a calm and reasoned look at the evidence out there and whether it proves or disproves the hypothesis.
Cite for the claim that “the entire thing descended into slander and ranting”? I think that most of the official, formal complaints about Summers’ remarks, such as the ones jshore linked to, were quite restrained and rational.
And, as I pointed out above, the primary cause of the whole brouhaha is that Summers himself did such a shitty job of arguing his point. He himself was certainly not offering “a calm and reasoned look at the evidence”; he was chiefly offering lame arguments he pulled out of his ass.