"What you have in a college presidency is a whole lot of responsibility and not a lot of authority," said Robert Atwell, a former president of the American Council on Education. "Summers may have been trying to change that formula, but a college president has to walk a tight wire, and I suspect he's learned that the hard way."
Summers first scrambled to make amends last month after ruminating out loud in an address to a meeting of the National Bureau of Economic Research. During the meeting, according to transcripts he later released under pressure, Summers suggested that "issues of intrinsic aptitude" -- rather than discrimination -- played the most crucial role in the low representation of women in science and mathematics posts.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday February 27, 2005 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 48 words Type of Material: Correction
Harvard president -- An article in Saturday's Section A said Harvard's board chose Lawrence H. Summers in July 2001 as the university's 27th president since its founding in 1640. Summers was chosen in March 2001 and took office in July 2001. Also, the university was founded in 1636.
Summers hedged his remarks with a researcher's dry, elliptical cautions, but women scientists in the audience homed in on his suggestion that innate differences between men and women explained the fact that science and mathematics have long been male provinces.
"If my reading of the data is right -- it's something people can argue about -- that there are some systematic differences in variability in different populations, then whatever the set of attributes are that are precisely defined to correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley, those are probably different in their standard deviations as well," Summers said.
After several participants stormed out and later publicly rebuked him, Harvard's own experts in those fields pounced on Summers' statements, saying he distorted research that did not support his conclusions.
Psychology professor Elizabeth Spelke and social ethics professor Mahzarin Banaji wrote in an open letter to the campus that "the views he expressed at that meeting are wrong, and the most powerful barriers to gender equity in math and science come from the factors he ignored or downplayed: the pervasive, implicit prejudice against women." Spelke is known for her research on gender relations.
"There's a fine line between stimulation and provocation and I think his problems occur when his leadership moves into the zone of provocation," said Kay Shelemay, a professor of music and member of Harvard's Committee on General Education.
Summers apologized publicly four times to his faculty. For a tense two days this week, it seemed as if contrition was not enough. Angry critics rumbled that they would seek a vote of no confidence during a meeting of Harvard's undergraduate liberal arts faculty.
