Thursday, January 20, 2005

Flat Earth Society

Lawrence Summers has apologized, apparently for the third time, about those comments he made. Hopefully, he has shown the proper contrition for suggesting a hypothesis be tested.
I love this line:
"I deeply regret the impact of my comments and apologize for not having weighed them more carefully," Summers said in a letter to the Harvard community posted on his Web site and dated Wednesday. "I was wrong to have spoken in a way that has resulted in an unintended signal of discouragement to talented girls and women."
Right. So, now girls can't even hear a potential hypothesis for one of the factors that there are less women in the sciences. Because, that might frighten the horses.
Anyway, it seems rather obvious that the next Culture War in the academy will be between the Sciences and Humanities. Unfortunately, I don't want to be on the side of the Flat Earth Society on this one.

No comments: