Independent Women's Forum - Research Areas > Politics

Coming Soon to a Campus Near You

info@iwf.org (Allison Kasic) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 15:28:00 EST

Indoctrinate U, an awesome new documentary tackles important subjects such as speech codes, censorship, and enforced political conformity on campus, is hitting the road. Details about the movie's spring campus tour are available here. If it's coming to your area, it's worth checking out.

Latest on Larry Summers: Feminists Attack, Larry Apologizes!

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 15:26:00 EDT

The University of California has bowed to feminist pressure and uninvited former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers to speak there. According to a report from the online Harvard Crimson, a group of female professors from the University of California at Davis drafted an online petition that garnered more than 350 names:

Inviting a keynote speaker who has come to symbolize gender and racial prejudice in academia conveys the wrong message to the University community and to the people of California, the women wrote in the petition.

Summers sin asked if the reason for a smaller number of women at the more arcane levels of math and sciences might be that innate aptitude for the higher math and science is distributed differently. This triggered a firestorm that caused feminists to behave in a very mature fashion:

Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, walked out on Summers' talk, saying later that if she hadn't left, 'I would've either blacked out or thrown up.' Five other participants reached by the Globe, including Denice D. Denton, chancellor designate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, also said they were deeply offended, while four other attendees said they were not.
Summers said he was only putting forward hypotheses based on the scholarly work assembled for the conference, not expressing his own judgments -- in fact, he said, more research needs to be done on these issues. The organizer of the conference at the National Bureau of Economic Research said Summers was asked to be provocative, and that he was invited as a top economist, not as a Harvard official.

I don't know the source of the complaint that Summers is a racist. But, hey, why not just throw everything at him? Maybe he's a cat burglar, too.

True to form, Summers apologized again and said he was sorry he wasn't coming because he would have learned something.

Eight Lessons from Duke

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 08:00:00 EDT

Dennis Prager says that there are eight lessons to be drawn from the Duke rape scandal. Here is the fourth:

"[W]hile Duke University has good individuals, like most universities today, Duke is a moral wasteland. Eight-eight professors, abetted by Duke's president, created a mob mentality against the young men not unlike that of a lynch mob. Of course, nothing will be done to Duke's president or to those professors. To get fired as the president of an elite American university, one must suggest that men and women are innately different. Politically incorrect truth telling -- not race-, gender- or class-baiting of whites, athletes or males -- gets you fired. And Duke alumni will continue to fund Duke, just as Columbia University alumni are funding Columbia with record donations despite Columbia's reluctance to discipline radical students who violently disrupted a conservative speaker on campus last year."

Read the whole column.

One News Now: Campus activist says Duke officials, prosecutor had agenda

info@iwf.org (Allison Kasic) — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 16:23:00 EDT

Prosecutors have dropped all charges against three Duke lacrosse players accused of sexually assaulting a black stripper at a team party in March 2006. The 28-year-old accuser initially said she was gang-raped and beaten by three white men at a party thrown by the team. But, in a news conference Wednesday, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper declared the men "innocent" of the charges.

Cooper's office took over the case in January after the State Bar Association charged Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong with ethics violations. Alison Kasic, campus director for the Independent Women's Forum (IWF), says Nifong and the "guilty until proven innocent crowd at Duke" should be eating crow.

"I think the sad part of this is that if this happened on any other campus, you'd probably get a similar reaction. This isn't a campus climate that's specific to Duke," she said. "I think you have a lot of college administrators and professors around the country who are just kind of pushing their own political agenda, regardless of what the facts actually say in these cases."

According to Kasic, "a disturbingly large majority within the Duke administration and faculty laid the lacrosse team out to dry from day one of the investigation." And she believes the anger and vitriol directed at the three players was completely unjustified.

"It does get to a larger problem within higher education of sort of political agendas and everyone trying to push their own agendas ... at the expense of their students," the IWF spokeswoman said. "They're willing to kind of sacrifice them in order to promote a bigger message about sexism and racism, and I think that's just horribly inappropriate."

Kasic says Nifong, who faces disbarment for withholding exculpatory evidence, should be "severely punished" for "playing politics with the law."

Another Historic First for Women

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 17:03:00 EST

It looks like Harvard is going to have a female president. NOW is applauding this as another big step forward for women. They credit, however, Harvard's former president Larry Summers as the real cause of this appointment:

"NOW is so pleased that Harvard will finally have a female president-- and it has only taken them 371 years. Larry Summers, we couldn't have done it without you," said NOW President Kim Gandy.

Isn't it sexist to assume that the reason that Harvard selected Drew Gilpin Faust, the woman rumored to be about to take Harvard's top slot, is as a payback for Larry Summers? I know nothing about Ms. Faust, and I hope that she is what Harvard needs: someone committed to academic excellence and true diversity of thought. But as a former Harvard grad student, count me as a skeptic.

Harvard is the pinnacle of political correctness, where academic inquiry is low priority compared to furthering "enlightened" liberal causes. Larry Summers (the former Clinton Treasurer Secretary who was considered far too right-wing for good old Harvard) lost his job primarily for daring to question one of the tenets of political correctness: that there are absolutely no differences in the intellectual strengths of men and women. With each year, new research comes out that makes denial of sex differences increasingly ludicrous. But that hasn't penetrated Harvard. What are the chances that Ms. Faust is going to encourage serious debate and consideration of these types of issues when it is clear that her job would be in jeopardy if she were to stray from the institution's liberal orthodoxy?

Good luck to Ms. Faust, but I think the university is doomed to continue its slide toward irrelevance.

Was the Duke lacrosse scandal a metanarrative?

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Hays) — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 07:40:00 EST

There were so many things that went wrong with the rape allegations scandal at Duke University. IWF is in the process of putting together an all-star panel to examine the issues.

Meanwhile, Charlotte Allen has produced a terrific piece on the scandal for the Weekly Standard. A lawyer, Charlotte is great on the legal flubs, but she is even more brilliant on the intellectual atmosphere at Duke that led to the ridiculous response of the benighted faculty:

[I]t was the Duke faculty that could be said to have cooked up the ambient language that came to clothe virtually all media descriptions of the assault case -- that boilerplate about "race, gender, and class" (or maybe "race, gender, sexuality, and class") and "privileged white males" that you could not read a news story about the assault case without encountering, whether in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or Newsweek for example. The journalists channeled the academics.

Although outsiders know Duke mostly as an expensive preppie enclave that fields Division I athletic teams, the university's humanities and social sciences departments -- literature, anthropology, and especially women's studies and African-American studies -- foster exactly the opposite kind of culture. Those departments (and especially Duke's robustly "postmodern" English department, put in place by postmodernist celebrity Stanley Fish before his departure in 1998) are famous throughout academia as repositories of all that is trendy and hyper-politicized in today's ivy halls: angry feminism, ethnic victimology, dense, jargon-laden analyses of capitalism and "patriarchy," and "new historicism" -- a kind of upgraded Marxism that analyzes art and literature in terms of efforts by powerful social elites to brainwash everybody else.

The Duke University Press is the laughingstock of the publishing world, offering such titles as "Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity" and "An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures." Phrases such as "race, gender, and class" and "privileged white males" come as second nature to the academics who do this kind of writing, which analyzes nearly all social phenomena in terms of race, gender, class, and white male privilege. A couple of months after the lacrosse party, Karla F.C. Holloway, a professor of English and African-American studies at Duke, published a reflection on the incident titled "Coda: Bodies of Evidence" in an online feminist journal sponsored by Barnard College. "Judgments about the issues of race and gender that the lacrosse team's sleazy conduct exposed cannot be left to the courtroom," Holloway wrote. "Despite the damaging logic that associates the credibility of a socio-cultural context to the outcome of the legal process, we will find that even as the accusations that might be legally processed are confined to a courtroom, the cultural and social issues excavated in this upheaval linger."

There was a fascinating irony in this. Postmodern theorists pride themselves in discerning what they call "metanarratives." They argue that such concepts as, say, Christianity or patriotism or the American legal system are no more than socially constructed tall tales that the postmodernists can then "deconstruct" to unmask the real purpose behind them, which is (say the postmodernists) to prop up societal structures of -- yes, you guessed it -- race, gender, class, and white male privilege. Nonetheless, in the Duke lacrosse case the theorists manufactured a metanarrative of their own, based upon the fact that Durham, North Carolina, is in the South, and the alleged assailants happened to be white males from families wealthy enough to afford Duke's tuition, while their alleged victim was an impoverished black woman who, as she told the Raleigh News and Observer in a credulous profile of her published on March 25, was stripping only to support her two children and to pay her tuition as a student at North Carolina Central University, a historically black state college in Durham that is considerably less prestigious than Duke. All the symbolic elements of a juicy race/gender/class/white-male-privilege yarn were present. The theorists went to town.

Bauerlein Weighs in on Duke

info@iwf.org (Allison Kasic) — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 09:29:00 EST

Mark Bauerlein has this excellent commentary over at NRO's Phi Beta Cons on the open letter from Duke faculty that I posted here on Inkwell (and at PBC) yesterday:

"The letter from the Duke faculty posted by Allison has the tone of a measured and judicious response to the lacrosse case, but several times the tendentious heat seeps through. Consider this sentence: 'We appreciate the efforts of those who used the attention the incident generated to raise issues of discrimination and violence.' Now, just think of what it means to 'use' a controversial incident in which people’s lives are at stake in order to 'raise issues of discrimination and violence.' The slide into irresponsibility, the temptation to attach age-old grievances to every present circumstance, the assumption that the 'users' have a privileged hold on 'discrimination and violence' -- all of these are precisely what due process is designed to forestall. The faculty praise people who exploited a tense situation. Don’t they see that this is one reason they took so much criticism?"

Duke Profs Issue Statement

info@iwf.org (Allison Kasic) — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 11:01:00 EST

Several members of the Duke faculty have posted an open letter to the Duke community, available online here. You'll note that some of these professors also signed on to an ad last spring that appeared in the Duke Chronicle, which among other things alleged a 'social disaster' at Duke and thanked students who were protesting against the lacrosse team.

Reading their letter, I was reminded of K.C. Johnson's excellent article from Inside Higher Ed from a few weeks back, which featured this assessment of the professors' behavior:

"The behavior we've seen from Duke's faculty -- the frantic rush to judgment coupled with a refusal to reconsider -- was all too predictable. The Group of 88's statement was fully consistent with basic ideas about race, class, and gender prevalent on most elite campuses today. Reconsidering their actions of last spring would have forced the Group of 88, and sympathetic colleagues, to reconsider some of the intellectual assumptions upon which the statement was based.

"Duke's Gustafson recently reflected on what his colleagues had done:

"'We have removed any safeguards we've learned against stereotyping, against judging people by the color of their skin or the (perceived) content of their wallet, against acting on hearsay and innuendo and misdirection and falsehoods. We have formed a dark blue wall of institutional silence; we have closed Pandora's box now that all the evils have made it into the universe; we have transformed students from individual men to archetypes -- to 'perfect offenders' and 'hooligans' -- and refused to keep their personhood as a central component of all this. We have taken Reade, and Collin, and Dave, and posterized them into 'White Male Athlete Privilege,' and we have sought to punish that accordingly.'"

An Interview Not to be Missed

info@iwf.org (Allison Kasic) — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 14:00:00 EST

The Jan. 15th issue of Newsweek features an interview with Reade Seligmann, one of the three players standing trial in the circus that is the Duke Lacrosse "rape" case. The interview focuses on some of the biggest victims throughout this ordeal: the families of the players.

Give it a read here.

A Dirty Dozen or More

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 11:26:00 EST

The Young America's Foundation has assembled a list of the dozen looniest and most politically tendentious college courses of 2006-2007, a few of which I highlight below. Go to this link to see the rest, in addition to an array of "dishonorable mentions":

Occidental College's The Phallus covers a broad study on the relation "between the phallus and the penis, the meaning of the phallus, phallologocentrism, the lesbian phallus, the Jewish phallus, the Latino phallus, and the relation of the phallus and fetishism."
Queer Musicology at the University of California-Los Angeles explores how "sexual difference and complex gender identities in music and among musicians have incited productive consternation" during the 1990s. Music under consideration includes works by Schubert and Holly Near, Britten and Cole Porter, and Pussy Tourette.
Amherst College in Massachusetts offers Taking Marx Seriously: "Should Marx be given another chance?" Students in this class are asked to question if Marxism still has "credibility," while also inquiring if societies can gain new insights by "returning to [Marx's] texts." Coming to Marx's rescue, this course also states that Lenin, Stalin, and Pol Pot misapplied the concepts of Marxism.
Students enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania's Adultery Novel read a series of 19th and 20th century works about "adultery" and watch "several adultery films." Students apply "various critical approaches in order to place adultery into its aesthetic, social and cultural context, including: sociological descriptions of modernity, Marxist examinations of family as a social and economic institution" and "feminist work on the construction of gender."
Occidental College -- making the list twice for the second year in a row -- offers Blackness, which elaborates on a "new blackness," "critical blackness," "post-blackness," and an "unforgivable blackness," which all combine to create a "feminist New Black Man."
Border Crossings, Borderlands: Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Immigration is University of Washington's way of exploring the immigration debate. The class allegedly unearths what is "highlighted and concealed in contemporary public debates about U.S. immigration" policy.

"Dear Professor: My Dog Ate My Homework"

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Allen) — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 11:11:00 EST

Courtesy of Rod Dreher comes this column for Town Hall by Mike S. Adams, criminology professor at the University of North Carolina's Wilmington campus, where he's apparently the only conservative prof. on an ultra-politically correct and "sensitive" campus. It's an open letter to one of his students:

"Dear (name deleted):

I received your message indicating surprise and disappointment with your final grade this semester. In your message, you said 'I did miss several days in your class. I did not mean to miss but I was just going through so much this semester with a death in my family, my house got robbed, fired from my job for being 10 minutes late and my good friend died so i [sic] am sorry for that.'"

Read Mike's very politically incorrect and insensitive response, especially after he looks up his records and discovers that the kid actually missed 28 sessions of his class. You'll die laughing.

Has the NCAA lost its marbles?

info@iwf.org (Allison Kasic) — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 15:53:00 EST

In the latest ridiculous move in the name of "gender equity," the NCAA is attempting to stop female athletes from training with male athletes.

I've got the details over at Phi Beta Cons.

And You Thought Co-Ed Bathrooms in College Dorms Were Weird

info@iwf.org (Charlotte Allen) — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 11:13:00 EST

How about co-ed bedrooms?

"Harvard is considering making its dorm rooms gender-neutral -- meaning brainiacs of both sexes would be able to bunk together -- a spokesman for the Ivy League university told the [Boston] Herald yesterday....

"'The discussion about gender-neutral facilities is an ongoing one. There are already gender-neutral suites, floors and entryways,' [Harvard spokesman Robert] Mitchell said. 'And wherever possible, we have created gender-neutral single occupancy bathrooms. (The dorm policy change) is something that is on the table.'"

The co-ed rooms were the brainchild of some Harvard students (wouldn't you know?) who pointed out that Clark University in nearby Worcester, Mass., has co-ed rooms in its co-ed dorms, so why not Harvard?

"'They had a very good rationale,’ said Dean of Students Denise Darrigrand. ’(The current policy) doesn't acknowledge the fact that some people are gay. The new policy opens up options for people to live with someone with whom they are compatible. And, given other universities' experience with this, the reality is men and women who do choose to room together usually aren't dating.'"

We hope. Next at Harvard: Co-ed shower stalls.

Today's Sign of the Apocalypse

info@iwf.org (Allison Kasic) — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 15:08:00 EST

Coming soon to university near you: Fat Studies

Inkwell contributor Candace de Russy has more info over at Phi Beta Cons.

The Rape of Justice

info@iwf.org (Allison Kasic) — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 09:32:00 EST

Lost in the shuffle of election analysis was this fabulous article on the Duke rape scandal by Thomas Sowell over at National Review Online. It's worth going back and giving it a read. Sowell questions the motives of many parties involved in the case, including District Attorney Mike Nifong:

"Rape is a felony with serious consequences for all concerned. You might think that the district attorney would have some interest in determining whose story is credible and whose story is full of holes.

"But that is only if he is interested in seeing justice done. I predicted, months ago, that Nifong would let this case drag on until the public loses interest in it and then let it quietly fizzle out after the media spotlight is gone.

"After all, the case has already served his purpose in getting him his party's nomination for district attorney. It has also served the purposes of local racial activists by giving them an occasion to march, shout, denounce, and threaten.

"It has served the purposes of the Duke University faculty by allowing them to come out on the politically correct side of the issue by condemning the upscale white guys and showing solidarity with the black accuser.

"Why ruin all this by getting bogged down in facts?"

You can read the whole article here.

In other Duke news, another co-worker of the alleged victim is getting involved in the debate. See what he has to say here.

Balance needed in Bucknell's WRC

info@iwf.org (Allison Kasic) — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Harrisburg (Pa.) Patriot-News

Radical politics often fly under the radar at universities by disguising themselves as administrative offices or "resource centers."

While Bucknell University is still host to a number of administrative offices dedicated to liberal pet causes, there may be some hope of reform of the worst offender: the Women's Resource Center, following the resignation of controversial director Molly Dragiewicz.

In the last four years there have been three different directors of the Women's Resource Center. Each change brought hope that the new director would bring balance to the center. But each time another left-wing feminist determined to maintain the center's status quo of radical feminism was installed.

One needs to look no further than the WRC's program offerings to see the partisanship. The WRC has funded a long line of liberal speakers, including "diversity educator" Jane Elliott, pundit Susan Estrich and Catharine MacKinnon (who has stated that male sexuality is "activated by violence against women"), but not one conservative. In fact, Dragiewicz's WRC would not even sponsor one for free.

When given the chance to cosponsor renowned feminist scholar Christina Hoff Sommers with the Bucknell University Conservatives Club at no cost, Dragiewicz claimed that Sommers' work was not in line with the mission statement of the WRC. In other words, the WRC had no interest in sponsoring a conservative speaker and bringing political balance to their event series.

Often the WRC's programming has absolutely nothing to do with so-called "women's issues" -- as long as an event is sufficiently liberal the WRC has been eager to sponsor. Last fall the WRC hosted a film series featuring "Outfoxed," an anti-Fox News Channel film partially funded by MoveOn.org. Another recent event was a colloquium on African-American detective novels. To this day, the WRC has not provided an explanation as to how such events have anything to do with the women of Bucknell.

It is easy to see why so many Bucknell women feel excluded from the WRC, which caters only to left-wing tastes.

Perhaps the most egregious of the WRC's offenses was sponsoring a bus trip to Washington for a pro-abortion rally. A female student confronted the WRC leadership about their controversial event, asking for political balance. When she approached the director about sponsoring a trip to a pro-life event she was denied, and told it went against the center's mission.

Other students, including myself, have long pushed for the addition of pro-life links alongside the many pro-choice links hosted on the WRC website. Not surprisingly, the requests were quickly denied.

Sadly, the liberal-feminist bias seen at Bucknell is not an isolated incident. Carrie Lukas, the director of policy at the Independent Women's Forum and an expert on feminism on college campuses, points out, "The injustices at Bucknell are part of a disturbing trend nationwide for blatant partisanship amongst women's resource centers and women's studies programs. Only students who subscribe to left-wing politics benefit from these centers and can earn the title of 'feminist.'"

Bucknell has a great opportunity to take a step toward political balance on campus. The new director of the Women's Resource Center has the opportunity to discard the bias of the past and create a program which benefits all women at Bucknell.

Unless Bucknell can reform the Women's Resource Center and create a more welcoming, balanced office, its doors should be shut.

Allison Kasic is a 2005 graduate of Bucknell University and a regional field director in the Leadership Institute's Campus Leadership Program in Arlington, Va.

IWF Says Harvard Needs Lessons in Ideological Diversity, Not Gender Diversity

Wed, 18 May 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Contact: Christie Hobbs
Phone: (202) 349-5889

WASHINGTON, DC -- The Independent Women's Forum today expressed disappointment in Harvard University's decision to spend $50 million over the next 10 years on initiatives to make their faculty more gender diverse. With these initiatives, Summers hopes to curtail further criticism of his remarks from last January, implying innate gender difference could account for the dearth of women in the sciences.

"Fifty million dollars is an obscene price to pay for political correctness," said Nancy Pfotenhauer, president of the Independent Women's Forum. "Dr. Summers simply told the truth: that men and women are different. It is a shame he caved in to the blackmail of the radical feminists."

Highlights of the $50 million plan include a senior administrative post overseeing diversity and faculty development as well as a faculty development and diversity fund which will reward appointees who "contribute to diversity."

"As a graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, I know first hand the enormous lack of ideological diversity on campus," said Carrie Lukas, IWF's policy director. "Harvard's real diversity problem isn't its lack of female professors, but its intolerance for any opinions not shared by the liberal left."

Now Showing at the Crimson Theater

info@iwf.org (Paloma Zepeda) — Mon, 28 Mar 2005 00:00:00 EST

Ladies and gentlemen, the Harvard faculty would like to present its latest farce, "Ain't Got Confidence in Larry." It's a lighthearted slinging of arrows and spitballs, at an overwhelmingly competent university leader.

But seriously folks. The faculty's recent resolution of "no confidence" indicates that the Harvard faculty stands against academic freedom, against effective leadership, and ultimately and most ironically, against progress for the academy. They are too bogged down in petty personal squabbles and hogtied by archaic political correctness to see what is really at stake.

Members of the academy must, as a rule, be protected by the rules of academic freedom. The academy should function much like a free market -- good ideas will emerge through informed and respectful debate, and bad ideas will have their flaws exposed. When members of the academy refuse to engage in such informed debate, they shirk their basic responsibility to their profession and to their students.

Further, it is clear that the faculty cannot have reasonable objections to President Summers' accomplishments as a leader. He has pioneered revolutionary financial aid initiatives that increased access to Harvard for more students than any initiative since the GI Bill. He is accessible to students and faculty alike, and has innovative plans for expanding Harvard's campus into Allston to ease a problematic space crunch.

Everone knows this issue is not about women. President Summers' comments, while controversial, were not objectionable. President Summers has hired more female university vice presidents than any president before him. This issue has become a kind of "Pin the Quibble on the Donkey" -- every personal quibble every faculty member has ever had has been tacked onto "innate-gate."

Any member of the faculty voting for the resolution who truly believed it was about women was sorely mistaken. It is precisely this kind of histrionics that hurt the real advancement of women. When we focus myopically on issues of perceived injustice, we ignore the real women's issues: defense, democratic progress around the world, social security reform.

The Harvard faculty is made up of some of the smartest people in the world. I want to hear them talking about the real issues that face women, respectfully and like grown-ups. I want them to be able to agree to disagree. Any university that becomes an echo-chamber free from dissent has ceased to be relevant.

Paloma Zepeda is a junior at Harvard and a member of Students for Larry.

IWF Votes ''No Confidence'' in Harvard Faculty

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 00:00:00 EST

Contact: Louise Filkins
Phone: (202) 419-1820

WASHINGTON, DC -- The Independent Women's Forum today is disappointed --but not surprised --by last night's vote by Harvard faculty expressing its lack of "confidence" in Harvard president Lawrence Summers' leadership.

"Larry Summers engaged in what used to be known as academic speculation," said Carrie Lukas, director of policy at IWF. "He hypothesized that innate differences might contribute to the differences in numbers of men and women at the top levels of math and science in academia. Apparently, this was too politically incorrect for Harvard's faculty so they have taken the extreme move of censuring their president. It clearly shows that political correctness has taken over our college campuses."

Summers has since apologized many times for his statements made at an academic conference held in January. The Harvard faculty has met several times to discuss what actions, if any, to take.

"Dr. Summers needs to stop apologizing for his common-sense remarks and not resign as president," Lukas continued. "This is a ridiculous overreaction by radical feminists and other extreme leftists on campus who dominate too much of academia."

Summers Hatin', Happened So Fast

info@iwf.org (Carrie L. Lukas) — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 00:00:00 EST

National Review Online

You know it's a slow news month when statements by the president of Harvard University make headlines for weeks on end. Over six weeks ago, Larry Summers speculated that innate difference between genders may play a role in the under-representation of women among top scientists. The initial flurry of stories has since been followed by a CNN report, a series of Washington Post front-page articles, and countless hours of television punditry -- all covering the clash in Cambridge and how professors and students plan to reprimand their wayward leader.

Many believe this episode reflects an out-of-control campus culture that makes politically incorrect inquiry a near crime. Commentators -- myself included -- reveled in the caricatured reaction of professors like MIT's Nancy Hopkins, who nearly fainted upon hearing Summers' words. Intellectuals have debated the merits of Summers's hypothesis: Does the evidence suggested that more men are naturally gifted in math and science?

A less-examined aspect of the Summers's soap opera is how the anti-Summers campaign fits in to the larger feminist game plan. Feminists are looking for opportunities to prove their relevance and power. Toppling Larry Summers would fit the bill nicely.

It's been a rough year for old-guard feminists. Their archenemy, President Bush, was re-elected and the Democrat's advantage among women all but vanished. Many liberal stalwarts, including a defeated John Kerry, speculated that Democrats' stance and statements on abortion -- largely the product of feminists' influence on the issue -- alienated voters and needs moderation. Feminists watched as Senator Hillary Clinton, poster-woman for the feminist movement, launched a deliberate campaign to appear moderate and distance herself from the liberal left.

Another blow came when an ex-board member of the National Organization for Women in New York released Why Men Earn More. This book shatters the idea that the "wage gap," or the difference between the median wages of "working" men and women, is the result of discrimination.

Warren Farrell isolates the many decisions that affect how much individuals get paid: from the types of jobs they choose to their willingness to move locations and work long hours. Farrell details how women tend to make choices that mean they earn less than men. Women are less likely to work in hazardous jobs and jobs that are include physical discomfort, like being outdoors. Women gravitate to jobs that offer greater flexibility, more time off, and less travel. It's clear from Farrell's analysis that women's decision to opt for lower pay is not in itself a problem. In fact, it could be characterized as a healthy tendency in women, to place greater value on their time and quality of life than the extra dollars.

These developments are bad news for entrenched campus feminists loath to admit that, in the real world, women often act differently than men. The breaking of ranks among their key constituents -- from reliably liberal politicians to notoriously leftist Harvard University -- has to be alarming.

The effort to take down Summers, for what objectively appears a modest infraction against feminist orthodoxy, parallels the strategy advocated by many hawks in the war on terror. Toppling Saddam was a strategic move, they argue, because other countries are now more wary of crossing the United States. If Larry Summers is ousted for failing to tightly tow the liberal line, the feminists will prove their ability to punish future would-be dissenters. That's appealing for the gender warriors, but terrible for a Democratic party scrambling to project empathy for middle-American values.

The Larry Summers saga may seem like old news, but it speaks volumes about the prospects of the feminist movement and the Democrats who answer to them.

Have You Heard the (Gender-Equitized) Science Yell?

info@iwf.org (Catherine Seipp) — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 00:00:00 EST

You might think that the hard sciences would be resistant to the unscientific notion that equal opportunity necessarily leads to equal outcomes. Alas, no, as Harvard president Lawrence Summers discovered, when he suggested that perhaps women are "underrepresented" in science because they're innately less interested in the subject. The very notion caused a woman MIT science professor to walk out on Summers' speech; his ideas, she said, made her "physically ill."

Anti-suffragists used to claim that because women's minds are ruled by our reproductive organs, we're too irrational to vote responsibly. Tactics like getting the vapors when encountering a disagreeable idea don't exactly offer a powerful argument to the contrary.

Certainly the attitude of many women about all this defies logic. The National Science Foundation has funded a three-year grant called Gender Equity in Math and Science, and never mind that college women now outnumber college men, or that high school girls in general get better grades and test scores than high school boys. What matters to feminists, who have a knack for snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory, is that gender equity in math and science still has not been achieved.

This is a real bee-in-the-bonnet of educators now, from Harvard on down. Fundraising spiels from expensive private girls schools typically tout the fabulousness of their math and science programs. But what does it say about those dedicated to women's education that their big push is toward what most girls have to be persuaded to care about? It's really rather a sexist assumption that because men dominate science, then science is therefore more worthwhile than the humanities. You certainly don't see prestigious boys schools worrying that they have too many top science students and not enough, say, poets.

But girls, like boys, have a way of resisting what adults think is good for them. I glimpsed this up close a few years ago, when I visited a special summer camp that a woman software CEO had set up to encourage Silicon Valley high school girls interested in technology. There I witnessed a perfect little paleofeminist-vs.-postfeminist moment: One of the earnest, gray-haired female professors was advising the girls what to do if an job interviewer asked inappropriate questions like, "How soon do you plan to have children?" That would be of course illegal, but the professor advised the girls not to argue about it but to say something like, "I THINK what you're asking me is if my job will always come first, and the answer is YES!"

There was a silence as these words sort of hung in the air. How did this bunch of shy, mostly Asian teenagers know that a job would always come first? Had each one already decided that it absolutely should? Finally one girl raised her hand.

"Can you just decline to state?" she asked tentatively. "Because I kind of have a philosophy that family comes first." Not exactly the sort of sentiment the women role models in the room wanted to hear.

But back to your tax dollars at work. At the University of Michigan, one of nine institutions that benefited from a $3.7 million NSF grant to study the experience of women scientists on campus, researchers found that 41 percent reported gender discrimination and 20 percent "unwanted sexual attention" according to the campus newspaper. Those survey figures don't sound very scientific, however, when the report went on to reveal that "more than 300 faculty responded, with only 30 percent being male." Sounds like a rather self-selected group, to put it mildly.

Nevertheless, an NSF committee member said that "the study's results suggest that equality and leadership opportunities for women scientists are in need of great improvement." Maybe so, but I'd say that the scientific validity of this NSF research project is also in need of great improvement. Meanwhile, over at North Carolina State University, the NSF awarded $500,000 to three professors wishing to study whether a summer camp program called Girls On Track actually succeeded in keeping middle-school girls on track-- that is, continuing to focus on math and science in high-school and college. An example of a girl not on track, according to a 2002 story about the program in The Raleigh (N.C.) News and Observer, was 15-year-old Katie Fraser, despite her computer savvy.

"I look at computer science and associate it more with men," Katie told the paper. And what foolish, frilly career did Katie want instead -- Modeling? Dancing? No: "My ultimate dream is to go to law school." Uh-oh, better redirect that dream to something more appropriately gender-equitized.

What with all the funding and the proselytizing, it's unlikely girls are discouraged from careers in science now, and I'm skeptical of the notion that doors were always slammed in their faces. Even in 1950, no one stopped my mother from studying science, although (as she always said later) maybe they should have. She spent her spare time reading Milton in the library, but insisted on majoring in science, to be different.

A silly reason, obviously. But I'm afraid the only other two she ever offered weren't any better. The first was that the University of Manitoba science department had the best sports "yell," which years later my mother was still able to recite verbatim: "Hot damn, holy hell, have you heard the science yell? We want, God knows, more beer, less clothes."

The second was that as a girl science major, she got even more male attention. I was looking through her scrapbook of science major memories not long ago and came across this excited, scribbled note: "Crowned first girl to ever enter the engineers' common room! Wore my tunic with frosh beanie and science buttons..."

A bigger problem than gender equity is the incompetence of science instruction, beginning in the lower grades. I still remember having to explain to one of my daughter's elementary public school teachers, during a marine biology project, that a jellyfish is not a mollusk. But scientific illiteracy afflicts men as well as women and only starts in the schools. Robert L. Park, a University of Maryland physicist and professional debunker, argues in his book "Voodoo Science" that such ignorance is spread by the media, who feel no embarassment at their lack of rudimentary scientific knowledge-- basically throwing up their hands and letting any old fool have his say as long as it ups the ratings.

Thus we have the ever credulous Dan Rather, for instance, a few years ago soberly introducing a segment on "a backyard tinkerer" who's built a perpetual motion machine, "and you know, some people think that just maybe he has." Little guys who defy pointyhead experts are regularly wheeled out from the media's dusty prop closet of character cliches, and never mind that the pointyheads are usually right. The most pervasive unscientific assumptions crop up at that well-traveled intersection where pop culture meets public policy.

Over the years I've heard fellow journalists say all sorts of unscientific, silly things, especially when it comes to the notion that masculine and feminine behavior have any basis in biology. No, no, my media colleagues say; it's the culture. That's why women are underrepresented in science. So are stallions rarely used as riding horses because the mares get their more docile nature from leafing through those "How to Please a Man" articles in Cosmopolitan? (And do geldings behave the way they do because they subscribe to Eunuch Living?) Maybe the NSF can fund a grant to find out.

Catherine Seipp is a writer, and she edits the blog "Cathy's World."

Equal Opportunity - Not Equal Outcomes

info@iwf.org (Carrie L. Lukas) — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 00:00:00 EST

Baltimore Sun

Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers made a big mistake: He was honest. He reportedly had the temerity to suggest at a conference in Cambridge that innate difference between genders may play a role in the underrepresentation of women among top scientists.

The crowd of academics was shocked by this momentary deviation from politically correct dogma. The Washington Post quoted a distraught Nancy Hopkins, biology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: "I felt I was going to be sick. My heart was pounding and my breath shallow. I was extremely upset." Setting aside Ms. Hopkins' overreaction -- an embarrassing caricature of delicate female sensibilities -- what exactly is so threatening about the possibility that men and women have different intellectual preferences and abilities?

Leaders of the organized feminist movement see such ideas as an excuse for discrimination or for discouraging women from pursuing science. Yet once again, the gender warriors are confusing equality of opportunity with equality of outcome.

Mr. Summers, in the spirit of scientific inquiry, was exploring potential explanations for an observable fact: that women on average are less likely to reach the upper echelons of science than are men. He has not questioned whether individual women can excel in these disciplines.

Nor is anyone arguing that women should be blocked from studying or conducting science. The principle of "equal opportunity for all" is universally accepted in America. It's possible, though, that women may have the same opportunities but less interest in some fields than men. This upsets the hard-core feminists, who want a world where women and men fill quota-like 50-50 percentages in all walks of life. It's this obsession with equal outcomes that induces palpitations and the vapors when the president of America's most solidly liberal university merely voices a stray thought.

The constant grumbling about the "wage gap" -- the difference between the median wage of women and men -- is another product of this obsession. If the gap were caused by systemic discrimination, the feminists would have a point. The reality, however, is that differences in wages reflect legitimate choices about where and how much to work. Compare a man and a woman in the same field with the same experience and education, and the gap shrinks rapidly.

We know individuals make different tradeoffs in their jobs: Some seek solely to maximize earnings, while others opt for less pay and greater personal fulfillment or flexibility. On average, women have tended to value greater flexibility, shorter schedules and more time with family. As long as men and women have different preferences, there's going to be a statistical "wage gap."

Title IX is another example of the feminist fixation on outcomes. This federal law was intended to prevent gender discrimination on college campuses, including in athletics. It has evolved into an outcome-driven policy in which litigation-fearing colleges strive to make athletic rosters "proportional" to enrollment. Since women account for more than 50 percent of undergraduates, women are supposed to account for more than half of all college athletes.

Cutting sports for men is the easiest way to achieve parity, since women on average are less interested in athletics. Since the 2000 Olympics, more than 90 universities have eliminated track and field for men, and more than 20 have canceled wrestling.

"Women's rights" once meant choices for women. No longer. Now feminists want to do the choosing for everyone, and woe to anyone who questions the outcomes they deem virtuous. It's a sad commentary on the leaders of a movement that once was devoted to freedom.