Gender Differences

Gerard Baker in the Times has some fun with the Larry Summers controversy:

You might think a distinguished and senior professor at one of America’s most renowned universities had seen it all by now. After a few decades of teaching and writing, a top academic such as Nancy Hopkins, professor of biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one might assume, would have developed a sturdy carapace of scholastic experience that would shield her from nasty side-effects of shocking solecisms by peers or students.

But this month at an academic conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Professor Hopkins observed something so unspeakable that, as she subsequently told reporters, it almost caused her to faint. “I just couldn't breathe,” she said. If she had stayed in the room, she went on, she would have either “blacked out or thrown up”.

What could have caused Professor Hopkins’s oesophagic crisis? Some grisly slide-show depicting the results of a hideous crime, perhaps? An outburst of obscenities from the podium? Something noxious dropped stealthily into her coffee during the mid-morning break? (You know how bitter these intra-academic rivalries can be.)

No. The answer was the spectacle of a fellow academic, a rather grand one, indulging in one of the most heinous transgressions known to humankind — daring to challenge that precious hegemonic orthodoxy of American academia, the impossibility of gender inequality.

Comments

[Andrew Zalotocky]

I'm sure that if Professor Hopkins hadn't been so upset she'd have remembered to say "African-Americaned out".