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Originally posted by sgtclub
I'm not asking if he was wrong on the substantive point. I'm asking whether he, as an academic, was wrong to openly consider what could possibly be true, as well as the reaction.
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I'm not bothering to stp here, but I think much of the objection to what he said is that he wasn't speaking "as an academic." He was speaking as the President of Harvard. If he hadn't been the President of Harvard, no one would have invited him, as an economist, even a distinguished economist and former Treasury Secretary, to address a conference about those issues in the sort of off-the-cuff way that he did. If he'd made those remarks as an economist, people would have thought that his remarks were shallow, and that he showed some gall by showing up at a conference where people have actually been doing research, etc. on these questions, and simply riffing on "what could possibly be true." Whether right or wrong, such musing doesn't advance the ball much.
Quote:
Originally posted by Burger
In reading the transcript, he seemed to go beyond posing the question, and posited the answer, without any real support (the excerpt I read, IIRC, basically was "there are three possible reasons--it can't be discrim., because we've taken steps to root that out; it might be a bit hours, but we see women achieve succes in other fields, so that's probably not it; third is inate differences, and because the other explanations are out, this must be the dominant reason." Uh, yeah, that's logical reasoning.
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He also seems blind to the idea that socialization might have a role, outside of socialization by parents. Belle Waring and some others have put this much better than I can -- I'll try to link to what I'm thinking of.
And the fact that the Harvard faculty is going after him now -- the only thing keeping the story alive, as far as I can tell -- surely has more to do with his particularly ham-handed way of running the University than with these particular comments, which have given his critics an opportunity.
