Becker and Posner disagree about the procedural side of the Lawrence Summers incident.
I think the most common or second-most-common reaction to this whole thing is the notion that although Summers's comments weren't wrong standing on their own, they were somehow the wrong thing for the president of Harvard to say in his role as president.
(Most common reaction is either that or idiotic mocking.)
Does anybody find it strange that an intellectual inquiry would be too controversial for (of all people) the president of Harvard? Would it worry you to be an alumnus of a school like that and have fellow alumni be the strongest holders of that opinion?
Yes, I, for one, think Harvard of all institutions should get with the times, should become significantly more meek, should satisfy itself with following the conventional wisdom rather than daring to be intellectually curious.
Apparently the much better presidential model is Neil Rudenstine, who devoted the vast majority of his efforts to fundraising, since heaven knows if there's one thing Harvard needs it's more of an endowment.
Posted by Matt Bruce at February 28, 2005 01:36 PMMaybe your section experiences were different, but in mine, I observed a lot of people talking out of their ass whom I would never assumed to have been demonstrating their "intellectual curiousity." Not everything contributed in a discussion setting advances the discussion, and on top of that, Summers had significant credibility issues on the topic he chose to talk about because he's defensive about decline rates of women among newly tenured faculty.
The real problem with this whole Summers pseudo-discussion is that it's very easy to construct an alternative series of events to debate in which the issues are free speech, academic curiousity, human liberty, etc. That's what's getting discussed in some segments of the population. Yet the people whose reactions to Summers have provoked such a backlash were reacting to what really happened at a conference, not an abstract debate about intellectual curiosity, which would have looked much different from Summers talking out of his ass.
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