Sommers on the Summers kerfuffle

Christina Hoff Sommers deftly tackles the debacle wherein the Harvard faculty voted that they had "no confidence" in Harvard President Larry Summers because he made some politically incorrect remarks. There's nothing new about the educated elite making bigtime asses of themselves over very small matters, but this time it comes as a watershed event in the sick history, such as it is, of political correctness at American universities:

To an outsider, the controversy must look very strange. Nothing Summers said was a threat to the advancement of a single competent woman in any of the sciences. The statistical fact that more men tend to score in the top-five percent of math-aptitude tests makes no predictions whatsoever about the abilities of any particular man or woman. Far from being outrageous or sexist, Summers's comments were completely respectable and altogether mainstream. But not in the academy. As one outraged Harvard feminist professor of ethics, 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."
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Think of these women [Summer's feminist critics]: Nancy Hopkins, Natalie Angier, Megan Urry, and Virginia Valian. It is rare to meet such people in everyday life — but the academy is their natural habitat and there you find them in dismayingly large and indignant numbers. A few Harvard women have come to Summers's defense: the literary scholar, Ruth Wisse, the economist Claudia Goldin. But few women and even fewer men stand up to the hard-liners in the academy, who are ever eager to show that "men just don't get it." Some male faculty have openly supported Summers (most notably, Steven Pinker and Stephan Thernstrom) but it appears that most have run for cover, or joined the pack of Summers's tormenters.

The Harvard faculty is in very bad shape right now. Summers could be forced out and replaced by a right-thinking woman. The forces of resentment have the power to do that. But, what they do not have is the power to repeal the laws of nature. Mother Nature does not play by the rules of political correctness. And not even Harvard can flourish when intellectual freedom is forced to play by twisted feminist rules.