After Harvard Controversy, Conditions Change but Reputation Lingers

Post-Larry Summers Harvard update:

It has been five years since Lawrence H. Summers, then the president of Harvard University, suggested at an academic conference that innate differences might explain why fewer women than men succeed in science and math careers. His remark sparked a firestorm that brought many changes — among them, Mr. Summers’s resignation and the naming of the university’s first female president, Drew Gilpin Faust.

Although many top universities took action in the early 2000s to help women, especially women in science, Harvard, under Mr. Summers, had an unimpressive record. Tenure offers to women plummeted after he took office in 2001. While Harvard extended 13 of its 36 tenure offers to women the year before Mr. Summers became president, that dropped to 4 of 32 the year before his speech. And several departments did not have a single tenured female professor.

Then, at a conference in January 2005, Mr. Summers delivered his now infamous remarks.

He told the audience that “there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude,” which he said were reinforced by “lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination...”

Read the rest of the NYT article here.