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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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In late February, while Harvard battled through the stormy aftermath of the most talked-about speech ever delivered at an economics conference, Yale was feeling the ripple effects. Yale faculty, says Carolyn Mazure, a psychiatry professor and associate dean for faculty at the medical school, “appear disturbed and chagrined” by the Harvard president’s remarks about female scientists. “I think he should resign,” says engineering professor Lisa Pfefferle. “I don’t feel that a person in his position should make such statements, especially when the evidence he uses to back them up shows he does not understand the science.” “I think he should be fired,” says Shirley McCarthy, a professor of diagnostic radiology. She said it twice. “All my colleagues, men included, are outraged.” Summers’s speech at the January conference of the National Bureau of Economic Research was complex, fluidly argued, and full of caveats (“I don’t presume to have proved any view that I expressed here”) as well as exhortations for equitable hiring policies (“issues around child care . are enormously important”). But what shocked the Yale scientists was the hypothesis Summers presented as to why there are fewer tenured women than men in science and engineering at top universities. Family priorities are the most important reason, he said; least important are the effects of socialization and discrimination. In between he placed what he called “issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude.” In other words: fewer women have what it takes to be great scientists. The criticism is still pouring in, including a statement from the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that “there is no evidence—nor has there ever been—that [gender] predicts aptitude in science.” Meg Urry, Yale’s first tenured female physicist, published an op-ed in the Washington Post. Susan Hockfield, Yale’s provost until last October and now president of MIT, coauthored an op-ed with the presidents of Princeton and Stanford. It’s a bracing test case for Yale values. Yale has often declared its commitment to diversity. But should academics be outraged when another academic speaks his mind? Don’t universities stand or fall by their commitment to free inquiry? “There shouldn’t be any area that we can’t consider for research,” says chemical engineering professor Gary Haller. “We ought to be able to think about anything.” Mazure responds, “We embrace the responsibility to raise difficult issues for discussion, but we don’t believe it’s responsible for anyone to offer a position that does not embrace the available data.” Haller himself thinks the president of Harvard shouldn’t try to hypothesize in public, as a private person, about sensitive academic issues. If Summers is controversial for his provocative style, Yale has the opposite model. In an interview in this issue, Levin talks about his relatively conservative approach to public declarations. Asked about his reaction to Summers’s speech, he offered minimal comments—mostly on Yale’s own gender diversity: “During the past 12 years, the number of tenured women has more than doubled, and the number of tenured women scientists in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has increased by a factor of two and one-half.” But numbers don’t completely speak for themselves. Diversity policy will continue to be a hot issue at Yale—among those who question it as well as those who support it—and we’ll continue to cover it. Stay tuned. |
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