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Rachael, I don't guess I know that many people who think of themselves as intellectuals—or would say so out loud, at any rate, no matter how much they love kicking around ideas. (My mom described me that way once, in anger, and it was soooo not a compliment. "Who died and made you Lionel Trilling, missy?'' was the drift, and doubtless with good reason.)
I did work for an intellectual at one point—and I know this because he spoke of it constantly; in fact, he talked so much about his own heapin' helpin' of smarts that one wondered, as he would have said, how wide-ranging his great thoughts really were.
Public intellectuals in recent political life? Obama would be the first in the White House since ... Woodrow Wilson? (Or can a rip-roaring racist ever qualify as such?) Otherwise, we've had Pat Moynihan, by any standard, Al Gore, as a great prophet and popularizer of science and technology he was quick to grasp the significance of, Bill Bradley in his own mind, thanks to John McPhee, and uh ... not Bill Clinton, though he is definitely 10 kinds of smart. I guess no Republicans spring to mind because they've been running against the Ivory Tower crowd for as long as I can remember.
What does it even mean to be living the life of the mind in this moment of the body/age of the Internet/time of the more, faster, ruder, and right now? I had a French boyfriend—yes, this was after the war—who defined an intellectual as anyone compelled to "passer des nuits blanches'' for the sheer pleasure of it, in the grip of a book. But to then brag about it? Pas sexy, even in France. And in this country, our challenge seems to be to find that middle ground—your favorite spot, Rachael—between pride in mediocrity and pointless showing off. Aspiring to know more should be a given and shared goal rather than, as you say, just another way to divide us into haves and (ha-ha, you down there) have-nots.
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Judith, you nailed the efficiency vs. availability conundrum. I'm sure there is room for law firms to dethrone The Hour—and here's a good recent Slate piece by Lisa Lerer explaining why the push for them to do so is coming from their clients. Perhaps most law firm work could be judged in terms of who does good work fast instead of who posts the most 12-minute increments. But for reality's sake, I feel compelled to recognize that sometimes, availability is the golden egg. Some clients see premium value in being able to reach their lawyer at all hours, and that's why the firms cater to this demand. It's possible that the market overvalues availablity—I'd like to think so—but I'm not sure. (Anyone got any good evidence on either side?)
One more point: In her new book The Sexual Paradox, Susan Pinker writes about studies of academia that mirror the finding that intense career paths play out differently for men and women. In a large study of the University of California system, Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden found that married male scientists have a productivity edge over married female scientists, and over single people. For one thing, many more of the men have stay-at-home spouses.
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The good news in the study Meghan writes about is that both men and women reported feeling more comfortable in professional groups that included more women. Does this mean that men, too, find predominantly male groups more intimidating? Or less interesting? I was in one of the first co-ed classes at the University of Notre Dame and the reaction we got all the time was, “Five guys for every girl; that must be great!” I knew no one who looked at it that way, but it was not all that harrowing, either. We were feminists who wore knee socks and loved the Virgin Mary, and about the craziest it ever got was at football games, some people would sing, “as our loyal sons and daughters march on to victory.’’ And some not.
When Domers of more recent vintage ask what it was like being a pioneer, I know they want horror stories and maybe the recipe for hoecakes, but all I’ve got for them is that on rare occasions, some stressed-out defender of the old order would lash out—most memorably when one of the few men in my Women in the Bible class stormed out shouting, “Mary Magdalene was a whore, and that’s all there is to it!” A far bigger issue for me was that only a handful of our tenured professors were female. But that, too, has long since changed, and nearly half of all undergraduates are women these days. So what would I tell those aspiring young scientists who see no one like themselves at the conference? In the immortal words of Margaret Spellings, put on your big-girl panties. And go anyway.
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I agree that it’s foolish for UC Davis to rescind its invitation to Summers to speak—even if his comments were foolish and ill-informed, as I argued two years ago.
But the problem with Christina Hoff Sommers’ piece—and the reason I don’t find it all that interesting—is that it does what has become a by now familiar two-step: First, it paints those who criticize Summers as suppressors of free speech, and invites us to think, erroneously, that it’s somehow taboo to talk in the sciences about biological basis for difference. In fact, Simon Baron-Cohen is quite well-regarded. (And if I recall correctly, at least one of the original scientists criticizing Summers’ comments herself studied the biological basis for sex differences.) Second, Hoff Sommers goes on to invoke a common-sense look at the world around us as evidence that OF COURSE brain differences explain the fact that women are nurses and men are pilots. What could we have been thinking all this time!
In doing so, Hoff Sommers gives no credence to the fact that the project of disentangling nature and nurture is extremely complicated. What makes these issues so hard to sort out is that the project of gender socialization begins almost the day a baby is born. I don’t say that to whitewash any “deeper” truths; I completely believe in the reality of biological differences, and I acknowledge that there are different distribution curves by gender. I just think we don’t know all that much about how they work yet—and yet we’re awfully quick to point to hard-wired biology as the underlying reason for all sorts of social discrepancies that can also be explained, at least in part, by discrimination and how we construct gender. (Megan McArdle had a good post a while back on this.) And there is plenty of contradictory evidence about just what “innate” might mean. If biology explains why our world is the way it is, as Hoff Sommers suggests, then why are women almost six times as likely today to get PhDs in physics than they were in the 1970s? Is it just that now all discrimination is gone? France has more female physicists than America does; are French women more “innately” interested in physics?
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But surely this was Sommers' point: How will we ever be able to talk about sex differences in an interesting way if we're not allowed to study them? If the subject is an academic taboo, then the same old cliches will just live on for another generation. Or ten generations.
And the Ahmadinejad comparison is actually quite interesting. I hated the fact that Columbia invited him, hated the accompanying self-important blather about free speech in America - the real subject should have been free speech in Iran - hated the Iranian president's transparently political motives for being there. On the other hand, when he did actually speak, he sounded so utterly ridiculous - "there are no homosexuals in my country" - that he mortally damaged his own "I'm-the-real- democrat-here" propaganda.
By the same token, open discussion of intellectual differences between men and women might well prevent the idea of a naturally scientific male brain from scaring off brilliant young female scientists. If any of them are actually scared, which I very much doubt.
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Yes, Larry Summers should be able to speak at Davis. He's done his time (and lost his job). But I'm not ready to says he's a hero for telling it like it is about women and the sciences, which is what Sommers implies. During the fracas over his remarks in 2005, Meghan O'Rourke wrote this good piece for Slate. Her point was that when a university president--with all the cachet that job entails--talks about biological sex differences, he better do it with intellectual rigor and tact. Summers had neither really.
Of course, he's not alone. We all tend to degenerate into generalization and flippancy when we talk about sex differences. This morning one of my co-workers was worrying about a conversation he'd had with a mother at his daughter's school, who'd tried to talk to him about rearranging a playdate for his kid and hers. He hadn't known anything about the arrangement in the first place, and I said that most moms would know not to try to talk playdate with a dad. Which didn't exactly give him credit for trying to sort it all out, or encourage him to try again next time. This is why when my husband chides me for referring to "my kitchen," I say I'm sorry. At least I think I do.
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Christina Hoff Sommers has an interesting op-ed in the WSJ today
about the academic struggles ignited over former Harvard President Larry Summers remarks about why women are not better represented in the hard sciences. On one hand an invitation for Summers to speak at U.C.-Davis was rescinded because, a faculty petition said, he "has come to symbolize gender and racial prejudice." (Can we agree it's outrageous that Ahmadinejad is allowed to speak at Columbia but Summers can't speak at Davis?) On the other, researchers in brain science are actively exploring how male and female brain differ.
The other day I was talking to my sixth-grade daughter about school and I asked her who the smartest kids in her class were. She listed a bunch of boys. "What about the girls?" I asked. "There are lots of smart girls, but they're not the smartest. But most of the kids who at the bottom are also boys." This is exactly one of the observations -- males are over-represented at the lowest and highest ends -- that got Summers in trouble. (Of course I told her she could forget becoming president of Harvard.) Discouragingly, she also told me that while the majority of candidates for class office were girls, the boys got more votes for class president. This is because, she explained, "Girls will vote for a boy. But boys would never vote for a girl." (I will not extrapolate from her class to the nation.)