February 20, 2005

IVY LEAGUE GROUPTHINK

A few days ago the “Boston Globe” published a short essay written by three of America’s most esteemed leaders in the world of higher education—John Hennessey, President of Stanford University; Susan Hockfield, President of MIT; and Shirley Tilghman, President of Princeton University. Not only is each of them a leader of a major institution of higher learning, but each of them touts his or her personal connection to a science—Hennessey, computer science; Hockfield, neuroscience; and Tilghman, molecular genetics.

Pretty heavy intellectual artillery, eh?

As it happens their sights were trained on Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard, for his now infamous remark to a group of intellectuals and academics implying that the unequal representation of women in the fields of science and math might have a basis in the different biologies of men and women. It should be noted that his remark was apparently nearly fatal to several of the lady professors attending the meeting and, choking with rage, they called the “Boston Globe” and tattled on Mr. Summers, who then had to run for cover and take a lot of crap from the intellectual left saying that he was beastly and hopelessly medieval in his thinking about women.

The “Boston Globe” essay, written by the trio of academic presidents with impeccable credentials was meant to establish once and for all where the academy and the scientific world stood on this matter. It was meant to put the kabosh on further legitimate discourse on the question of gender differences in cognitive functioning.

Most of the essay is a plea for affirmative action for women in the sciences. The model expressed here is based on the idea in a previous generation that blacks were discriminated against in medical or law school and required special recruitment and dispensations in the way they were educated. The authors implicitly and explicitly claim that women are discriminated against consciously and unconsciously by their mentors and teachers and that that accounts for the fact that they turn up in fewer numbers than their male counterparts in science programs.

Thus the solution to the problem is to rid the system of biases in teachers and mentors and teach the latter how to nurture the blighted kernel of science that exists within the souls of girls and young women.

One might have expected more from Stanford, Princeton and MIT than this politically correct mushy thinking. We might have expected a full-throated defense of academic and scientific values—open and fearless discourse of even the most unpopular ideas; the unbridled pursuit of truth, evidence, facts; the questioning of cant; and the disavowal of political correctness whenever it is found in the academy. Instead we have the reverse—political activism and cant-like political correctness. Here is a sample of their views: “Extensive research on the abilities and representation of males and females in science and mathematics has identified the need to address important cultural and societal factors. Speculation that ‘innate differences’ may be a significant cause for the under-representation of women in science and engineering may rejuvenate old myths and reinforce negative stereotypes and biases.”

The above quotation represents a complete denial of the existence of powerful evidence that there are neonatal and early childhood differences that exist in brain, nervous system, and later in cognitive functioning. And that these gender differences are partly genetic and partly based on universal biological experiences such as the observation of sexual behavior in animals, pregnancy and birth of animal and human babies, and menstrual blood.

An example of brain differentiation during the neonatal period is summarized by Bruce S. McEwen, Professor and Head of Laboratory of Endocrinology, Rockefeller University: “What does all this mean for our understanding of behavioral sex differences? It means that male and female brains begin postnatal life with subtle structural and functional differences that bias the input and output of information and modify the storage of experience. Modern neuroscience teaches us that each experience and each psychological process involves neuronal activity and underlying chemical responses. The very chemistry of neurotransmission has the ability to modify nerve cell structure and function; these modifications can last for hours and may even lead to virtually permanent changes, as in learning. In fact, neurotransmitters, like hormones, can alter the expression of genes, leading to long lasting changes in the brain.”

And these long lasting changes in brain functioning may result in differential tendencies in cognitive behavior. A typical area of cognitive difference between boys and girls and men and women confirmed by countless studies is in spatial processing and abilities.

Thirty years ago such a claim was controversial and a tough minded French lady sociologist, Evelyne Sullerot, was determined to prove the claim false. Here is the description of her observations:

“My work in France involves career counseling for adult women. I decided to study the career orientation and training of girls and women in seven European countries, East and West. Ten years ago, when I began this project, I was convinced—and my publications record this—that social conditioning and education were entirely responsible for all the differences observed between men and women in career choice and career success. I still think this is true for an extremely large part of the differences in interest and taste that help determine one's choice of training and career.

“All the same, my environmentalist faith was shaken by facts—by stubborn facts. Hence I have followed the opposite path from those who of late have inordinately magnified the role of social causes. Social analysis no longer seemed sufficient to explain sex distributions in certain occupations, or the failure of certain educational experiments that were meant to change stereotypes. I began to look at the results of the differences in spatial aptitudes between boys and girls. Not, to be sure, that I think they explain everything! I would simply like to state that, starting from facts that have major economic and social consequences for women, I began, of course, by explaining everything in terms of the environment, the interconnectedness and ubiquity of stereotypes, the difficulties facing girls in entering new fields, and the politico-economic domination exercised by men for their selfish benefit.

“I investigated individual sectors of precision engineering, such as watch-making, where the tasks do not call for physical strength and the environment is neither dirty, noisy, nor rank with the smell of burning oil. I also knew that women had been involved in jewelry making since the Middle Ages, and watch-making can in a sense be seen as a branch of jewelry making. I had to face the facts: everywhere, women make clocks and watches, rapidly and expertly. With extremely rare exceptions, they do not design the mechanisms, do not invent any, and do not even repair them. In the Soviet Union, girls and boys were initially placed in the same watch-making schools. Today, there is one course of training for assembly and another for repair; there are only girls in the first and only boys in the second. This division was not intentional, and was even resisted. Yet little by little it imposed itself. I could give many other examples, all of them involving professions in which spatial aptitudes are a factor. Such differences between girls and boys may be exploited and transmitted by socioeconomic and sociopolitical structures that magnify their effects. [but] These social structures cannot be considered the sole causes of the consequences observed.”

Even though the three educrats tag themselves as scientists, they clearly have strayed from the values and methods of science. (Really first-rate scientists, rarely give up the scientific work they love in order to become fundraising figureheads.) They are more interested in rhetorical manipulations in the service of cant—that women are under-represented in science—than truth.

The outpouring of hostility from the academy against Lawrence Summers for being open-minded about a controversial area of human knowledge and understanding which is supported by the leaders of three of the most prestigious educational institutions in America shows to what degree our culture has been plundered, confiscated, and transformed into a drab Orwellian campus of group-think.