How Do I Look in This Beret?
Norman Levitt has some very pointed things to say about Harvard.
Harvard University, the oldest in the USA and the wealthiest in the world, thinks very well of itself…It is an open secret that [Summers] was handed the helm at Harvard out of a growing sense that the place had grown stale, complacent, and narcissistic. Too many Harvard professors had settled into the habit of assuming that any old doctrine, opinion, or casual observation they chanced to utter was, ipso facto, profound and epochal merely because it issued from the great faux-Georgian citadel on the Charles. In truth, the place had grown somewhat dowdy, intellectually speaking, and, even worse, had proved itself susceptible to the vagaries of academic fashion…In some areas, Harvard had not only tolerated trendy mediocrity, but actively embraced it. Summers’ task, then, was to shake things up and to restore a relentlessly meritocratic ethic to the process of hiring and rewarding faculty where mere piety and sentimentality had previously been permitted to call the shots.
It’s funny how exactly like the New York Times that description sounds – at least to me. Thinks very well of itself; stale, complacent, and narcissistic; profound merely because it is itself; intellectually dowdy; medicrity; piety. The Times has a dreadful habit of announcing that it’s the best newspaper in the world – which apart from anything else simply can’t be true, can it? Surely in the entire world there are better newspapers than the Times – aren’t there? If not I think I’ll have to join the French Foreign Legion.
But that’s a digression – except it’s not entirely: because the phenomenon of the complacently mediocre top of the heap is interesting, and it’s part of what Levitt is talking about. His account sounds plausible to me because I’ve seen the same sort of smugness in other institutions with excessively solid reputations. Or in people with the same things. Remember the Cornel West fuss?
Summers lost no time in taking up the challenge. Early in his regime, he notoriously confronted Black Studies eminence Cornel West, essentially accusing him of goofing off with flashy and trivial projects (like voice-overs on hip-hop CDs) rather than turning out scholarly work of real substance. The touchy West promptly picked up his marbles and headed for Princeton, where a certain soft-heartedness still reigns. Many Harvard students, bred on the platitudes of ‘diversity’ and greatly susceptible to West’s showmanship, were outraged…But though some still blame Summers for ‘losing’ West, the prevailing opinion – most often stated anonymously, of course – is that Summers did the university a favour by cleverly easing out a dubious academic ‘superstar.’
Showmanship. Just so. That’s a serious occupational hazard for academics, you know. It comes of spending much of one’s waking time telling callow ignorant young people what’s what. (We have a joke about it in the Dictionary. ‘Socratic deformation or elenchusitis.’) Men are especially prone to it. Yes they are; don’t argue. Come on, you know they are. It’s the sex thing. They know their students are going to get crushes on them – how can they help strutting a little? Whereas women mostly know their students are not going to get crushes on them, and are mostly not all that flattered if they do. (Why? Because young men are repellent, while young women are attractive. Next question.) Then add some flashy ‘radical’ politics and ‘Indian’ credentials (however bogus), and you’ve got yourself a first-class Che-wannabe. Tweak the ingredients and you’ve got Cornel West. Tweak again and you’ve got Judith Butler (I said men are especially prone, not exclusively). Particularly at a time when there are a lot of people around inexplicably willing to call some academics ‘superstars’ – the temptation is clearly almost overpowering. But how nice it would be if the dears would resist. They kind of discredit the whole enterprise when they preen themselves in public. They feed into the suspicion of people like Fox News anchors that universities are nothing but theatrical settings for people who like to dress up as wevowutionawies and frighten the bourgeoisie.
I was actually going to talk about the substance of Levitt’s article but I got sidetracked by the style question. But that’s just it: in a lot of cases I think the style is the substance. Looking at and reading Ward Churchill, I find myself convinced that he doesn’t really mean any of it, that he just says the most ‘radical’ thing he can manage to think of, for the sake of saying it. To show off, basically. I knew people like that when I was at university – boy, did I. They were so much more into posing than they were into really thinking about what they were talking about. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity, saith the preacher. Well he was a showoff too.
I’m sensing a salutary trend among journalists toward holding the Ivies’ and other “prestigious” universities’ feet to the fire over their manifold failures in educating their students (James Twitchell in Wilson Quarterly, Walter Kirn and Ross Douthout in Atlantic Monthly, among several others). Of course nothing will come of it. Everyone wants a degree from a brand-name institution, no matter how useless that degree actually is at indicating whether its holder knows anything.
I must argue. Some male faculty may know their students will get crushes on them (and we can all spot those showboats. They look like Ward Churchill), but many of us know we are frumpy and peculiar and geeky (and we don’t look like Ward Churchill), and know that if some girl were to come on to us it would be solely to cajole something out of us, and we are instantly suspicious.
And come on, college-age girls aren’t really repellent, but they are one step up from children. They aren’t really tempting at all.
I know, I meant ‘some’. I meant: of the faculty who know students will get crushes, most are males. But I was having too much fun to be precise.
“They look like Ward Churchill”
Exactly.
As for the college-age girls though…hmm. I mean, I wouldn’t think they would be tempting, but there does seem to be this, er, thing about extreme youth. But – you know – [mops brow nervously] – only among some male faculty.
Oh come on, OB, No doubt I speak for your readership in urging you to talk about the substance and not just the style of Levitt’s article. We can get another butt kicking discussion going.
But if you can’t do that, this stuff about the crushes might be the next best thing, so I’ll raise a question. Do males really get crushes on female professors, or are they just looking for surrogate moms? Or is that the perception among female profs? I don’t think it’s just that males are repellent. I think the prof realizes that male students aren’t able to offer them what they want, even if the students are actually pleasant,.
Funny: all that description of Harvard and the NYTimes actually reminds me a bit of Summers, too; he’s not so much of an outsider, after all. There’s been a lot of good fundamental work on undergraduate education done in the last few years, led by long-time Harvard faculty; there’ve been some really great, but not flashy, hires in fields I know well, by committees headed up by long-time Harvard faculty.
The faculty I learned from at Harvard were pretty retiring types, outside of their areas of expertise, and intellectually responsible (even kind of conservative, theoretically speaking; if prefering evidence and logic over theory is “dowdy”, then so be it). The showboats were useless as teachers (but great people to get recommendations from). Harvard may have more of them than their fair share, but someone’s got to.
I don’t usually get defensive about Harvard: it deserves a lot of the brickbats it gets, and can take care of itself. But the flashy controversies and trendy academia-bashing are tiresome and obscure the real and important and interesting work which still goes on there in huge quantities and at high levels of quality.
By the way, I don’t want my students, male or female, to admire me or become infatuate. I want grudging, hostile respect caused by the painful growth which comes of forcing their minds to engage critically with both facts and ideas. I want to be the one they mention at reunions… “boy he was a hard-line son of a gun, but I really did learn something. I wonder what he did after they fired him for grading on merit?”
I’m going to bite and address the arguments anyway.
I was somewhat intrigued by his stance that “the most striking aspect of which was the intemperate response of a number of feminist scientists, who offered no counter-arguments, but simply declared the whole idea misogynistic and therefore forbidden intellectual territory.”
I mean, I could say that black people are all stupid and that is why there are less of them teaching at the best Universities, despite positive discrimination, and produce shit loads of data to back me up. But somehow I doubt he’d be surprised by people declaring the whole idea racist and therefore forbidden intellectual territory. I’m also intrigued that he regards the burden of proof being on those who object to the theory, particularly when he makes the thoroughly unsubstantiated claim that “it seems reasonable to assume that genetic differences, acting via neurophysiology, are chiefly responsible for the observed differences in performance”. I thought mathematics demanded higher standards of proof than the sciences!
And since I’ve let myself get all annoyed by reading that article again I’m going to address these mere mathematical facts of life that are so reasonable that only a raving hairy feminist would object to them.
As it happens, I think the hypothesis that there are more men suited to a career in highly mathematical subjects than women is true, but just how many more men is the question, and why?
First I should just mention the general lability of these tests, as things like the Flynn effect indicate.
Second, the normal distribution (bell curve), is a much abused concept, but it is worth pointing out that the reason IQ tests are normally distributed is that is how we make them, by selecting test items that will give that distribution, if you want, you can get different distributions, but they are harder to deal with statistically, so we don’t. Therefore, just because our test is normally distributed, doesn’t mean the trait is measures is. In fact, these tests mesure those traits only in so far as they ask questions that seem to test what we regard as mathematical ability, they do not define it.
It is interesting to note the reason why men and women have equal scores on IQ tests, it is because we select the right mix of questions to make this the case, because we design them based on the a priori hypothesis that men and women have equal overall IQs. It doesn’t seem unlikely to me that we could design mathematical or verbal subscales where men and women also scored equally, if we wanted to.
These arguments concern the extreme tails of distributions, the very regions where normality is least certain (because the tests aren’t designed to discriminate at these extremes, and because less people score there, making it difficult to model properly). That male and female scores differ in standard deviation is not an argument just about the tails of the distribution but primarily about the main body of the distribution (where most scores fall), these 1% tails are 3 standard deviations out from the mean and therefore contribute less to the value because there are so few values there (each one individually will contribute more because it is so far out, but this will be swamped by the massive difference in number).
“I’m also intrigued that he regards the burden of proof being on those who object to the theory,”
But does he? Surely his point is that objecting to the theory does not entail objecting even to discussion of it. I take Levitt’s point to be that the discussion should not be forbidden or foreclosed or declared taboo.
“I take Levitt’s point to be that the discussion should not be forbidden or foreclosed or declared taboo.”
Superficially, so do I, but I’m suprised that he is surprised by the backlash – hence my racism analogy.
However, I think he goes beyond that perfectly sensible point by then going on to make it pretty clear that as a matter of fact he believes that not only should the discussion not be taboo, but that the innate gender difference argument is right:
“I’m personally inclined to think that it’s right”
Now I think that, much like the race and IQ argument, it would be sensible to not rule out the possibility of the innate hypothesis, but that the burden of proof ought to be pretty high given the social ramifications, and the compelling evidence of discrimination and other more subtle gender issues.
Now I know what he means when he moans that some “accept it as a Revealed Truth that innate statistical differences between the sexes simply cannot extend to the cognitive realm, no matter what the evidence seems to show”. But I have sought to give some reasons why the evidence he presents for the hypothesis are not as secure as he implies, which I regard as important when he complains that the opponents “offered no counter-arguments”. He also rejects the counter arguments (that are not being given of course) with flippant broad strokes:
“despite…serious efforts to recruit and retain women in these challenging areas of science. The percentage of women mathematicians and physicists…has crept up only fitfully and slowly, in contrast to sciences like biology”
“Ironically…the numerical disparity between the sexes that characterises maths and physics faculties at Harvard, Princeton, Cambridge, Oxford and the like – is, in itself, pretty good evidence for the validity of the tail-end explanation offered for it…to assume that misogyny is behind the imbalance…is plainly not the case.”
Me again.
Just thought I’d share my thought on the fundamental flaw of the tail-end debate. I don’t really believe that extreme ability on IQ style maths tests is a good indicator of suitability for academic positions in maths and physics.
When I entered higher education many moons ago I initially studied mathematics before switching to the girlie sciences. In my experience ability at the arithmetic type questions you get in IQ tests (and similar instruments) has minimal ramifications for ability at University level mathematics, particularly in environments where a fairly high minimum standard had been achieved. In fact this lack of relationship proved to be the downfall of many fellow students – just being good at school maths wasn’t good enough to do well, because maths at University involves more than just crunching numbers at speed.
This paper has a similar hypothesis:
http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~weinberg/uppertail.pdf
That said, the truly freaky mathematical geniuses who just seemed to have a intuitive feel for the subject were disproportionately male in my experience.
Hey, what about me? I hardly ever meet any of my students in the flesh, and more than half of them are older than me, so all those young men / young women generalisations don’t apply. How am I supposed to feel about the possibility of crushes?
Anyhow – he may have gone off the boil in recent years, but I’ve read some stuff by Cornel West that seemed good at the time. Churchill seems to be a rather different kettle of fish.
And another thing – you can be a grandstanding star without a huge amount to say and a political and methodological conservative. Maybe that’s easier in the UK.
“How am I supposed to feel about the possibility of crushes?”
You’re supposed to pine and feel sorry for yourself because of your lack of opportunities, obviously!
“I don’t really believe that extreme ability on IQ style maths tests is a good indicator of suitability for academic positions in maths and physics.”
Sure but that wasn’t what Summers was saying – was it? If Levitt has it right, anyway, he was simply offering possible explanations for the non-presence of women in maths and physics, not their suitability.
“If Levitt has it right, anyway, he was simply offering possible explanations for the non-presence of women in maths and physics, not their suitability.”
His argument hinges on those in maths and physics being those most able at maths, otherwise it wouldn’t explain the lack of women.
That said, what is he original source for Summers’ comments? I think I first saw it on pharyngula but I don’t remember seeing an original transcript anywhere.
But “being those most able at maths” isn’t the same thing as “suitability for academic positions in maths and physics”. I took you to mean by the latter something quite different from the former.
Source – hmm – don’t know. I first saw it on some major newspaper site or other, I think, but don’t remember which.
“But “being those most able at maths” isn’t the same thing as “suitability for academic positions in maths and physics”. I took you to mean by the latter something quite different from the former.”
Um, are we talking at cross purposes here? The argument proposed by Summers, and endorsed by Levitt, is that there are more men at the top end of ability at maths than women, hence less women in higher positions at university in mathematical sciences. Their evidence for this is that on IQ type mathematical subscales men have a slightly higher mean and standard deviation. So essentially the argument is that ability on standardised maths tests is a good indicator of suitablity/chances of getting in/motivation to do higher mathematical sciences