Larry Summers: Zombie or Pirate?

Hrm. Herr Professor Mr. Eric Rauchway, who I have just gobs of respect for (and who I think is a pretty right-on feminist dude, btw), argues that the Regents of the University(ies) of California ought not to have "disinvited" Larry Summers (who I have little to no respect for) from speaking, on the grounds that academic freedom requires us to be open, even welcoming, to controversy.

Summers's case differs. Here, the objection came from within the community of scholarly inquirers at UC Davis who organized a petition signed by UC professors who believe it "inappropriate at a time when the University is searching for a new president" to invite Summers, who "has come to symbolize gender and racial prejudice in academia" since his clash with African American Studies professor Cornel West and his 2005 comments on genetic differences in scientific aptitude between men and women.

You might think this looks a lot like the case of Edward Ross--in both, a northern California university doesn't want to hear from an economist talking the sociology of innate differences. But there are key distinctions. Summers doesn't work here and, as one of his Harvard colleagues points out, he doesn't have the right to "speak anywhere and everywhere" or indeed on everything.

What's more, academic freedom depends on reactions like the response to Summers's 2005 comments. Knowledgeable scholars including the sociologist (and my colleague) Kim Shauman explained that there was actually a great deal more research into, and knowledge of, the ways women founder in scientific careers than Summers had originally suggested. Summers, Shauman said, was "uninformed." As the economist Brad DeLong noted, "Summers's views on gender, genetics, and math achievement are almost certainly wrong, are unsupported, and should not be pushed forward by somebody who is twenty years beyond the stage of his career where you throw out lots of unfiltered ideas in the belief that what matters is the quality of your best one." For the scholarly community to retain its rights, it must present evidence and argument to define what is and isn't good scholarship--that's how the ideas of, say, an Edward Ross become known as bad sociology.

So far, I was expecting Rauchway to say something like what I asked him in an email about this piece, to wit:

Summers made some uninformed, unsupported comments about a field not his own, informed scholars pointed out that he did so, and it's a threat to scholarly freedom to explore controversial subjects that he was disinvited? You seem to be saying not that he was controversial, but that he was unscholarly.

But what Rauchway was actually arguing in the TNR piece is that

By succumbing to a demand that they reject a controversial, though--as a former treasury secretary, university administrator, and respected economist--obviously relevant speaker, the Regents have suddenly made life much more difficult for those of us in the business of presenting controversial, if relevant, ideas and guest speakers on UC campuses. Casting someone as utterly outside the university's conversation is the severest penalty we as scholars can impose--appropriate perhaps to Holocaust deniers and such ilk as exhibit a chronic impenetrability to reason. Lawrence Summers, though he said some things well worth objecting to, falls well short of that standard. By applying this ban to him, the Regents suggest an impossibly low tolerance for controversy at the University of California.

So part of my confusion is: why was he invited to speak in the first place, and on what topic? And moreover, I think Rauchway is conflating "unscholarly" with "controversial" (a conflation, to be sure, that a lot of Summers's critics and defenders have made all along).

So as I said, I emailed Rauchway (who hopefully will come talk with us in comments here), and pointed this out, and he offered a pretty good analogy, which stumped me for a bit:

Here's the analogy that sticks in my head: I invite Noam Chomsky to talk about US foreign policy. (I wouldn't, but suppose I did.) He's not actually a foreign-policy scholar, he's a linguist. But he's become a prominent, and controversial, speaker on that subject. It would be a cinch to get a few hundred signatures on a petition that reads, "it is inappropriate at a time when the country is at war to invite someone who has come to symbolize knee-jerk anti-American sentiment."

Would I be meant to cave in and disinvite Chomsky at that point? I say, no: he's a perfectly legitimate teaching resource. But the regents apparently say, yes.

Like I say, it stumped me for a bit. On further thought, I think it's kind of a false analogy, though. First, because Chomsky has quite a reputation for arguing, writing about, and speaking on U.S. foreign policy: he has an established reputation in that field. Summers made a one-off stupid speech (which he claimed was based on scholarly evidence that he didn't produce) which blew up into a momentary shitstorm; not quite the same thing as a record of thought on the topic. Second, if you think Chomsky's a nutter and present him *as* a teaching resource ("I've invited a nutter to come talk because I know a lot of students read him and I want the opportunity to talk about where his ideas are sound and where they're nutty"), that's a very different thing from inviting someone with, as I said in email,

a record of hostility to women/minority faculty *as such*, and that kind of thing is a bottom-line non-starter for any legitimate U. pres candidate.

to speak (presumably privately?) to a Board dinner.

That said. I suspect Rauchway is right, even though I myself would neither invite nor want to hear Summers speak (and admittedly this is more feminist, i.e. political, feeling than it is Serious Scholarly Objection to his inexpertise in sociology and women's studies). Certainly he's right in a political sense (though this isn't the argument he's making): disinviting Summers just feeds into the whole anti-feminist, anti-academic right-wing nutso argument about how liberals have taken over the academy and suppressed conservative Truths. Also, it's just kind of tacky and unprofessional to disinvite a speaker based on either peer pressure or information that was broadly known before the invitation was issued in the first place.

I think the Regents are being regenty, which is to say oversensitive to public appearances. Which is of course precisely the kind of thing faculty are supposed to object to. On the other hand, I just can't agree that the Summers argument that women are naturally stupider than men about science and math and stuff is legitimately controversial among intelligent, educated, informed, and intellectually honest people.