Nancy Hopkins' Hissy-Fit

I was one of the few English majors at an engineering school (Lehigh), so I am well aware that engineers are different from the rest of us.  I had friends that would wait eagerly for HP or TI to release the latest pocket calculator, and when they got one they would spend hours playing with it and show it off to all their engineer buddies.

Because of my close association with lots of engineers, I know I would have made a lousy one.  Its not that I'm stupid or anything, its just that engineers have a special (read weird) way of looking at the world.  For example:

(Thanks to Scott Adams, his syndicator, and the Fair Use Doctrine).

So, if not everyone has the blend of talents and interests necessary to make a good engineer, is that capability equally distributed among the sexes?  It beats me, but I guess it is an interesting question.

Not for Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at MIT.  Harvard President Lawrence Summers was speaking at a conference about the lack of women in the math and science professions.  He threw out the speculation that maybe there were innate differences in the sexes, as something that should be looked at.  This was enough to cause Ms. Hopkins to throw a hissy-fit and storm out of the conference:

"When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn't breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill," Dr. Hopkins said.

I'm not sure that Nancy Hopkins is doing her sex a favor by acting like a caricature of a hyper-sensitive woman.  I doubt her reaction was really this extreme, however.  As Ms. Lopez at NRO pointed out a few years back out, Ms. Hopkins has made a career out of being offended by stuff, and probably just saw Mr. Summers' remarks as another opportunity.

In my humble opinion, people who wander the earth looking for excuses to be offended should be mocked until they cry for mercy.  Jonah Goldberg agrees:

Doing remarkably little to combat the stereotype that women are emotionally frail and constitutionally incapable of dealing with stress, Professor Nancy Hopkins of MIT told the Boston Globe that she had to leave a lecture delivered by Harvard president Larry Summers because if she didn't she would have "either blacked out or thrown up."

What caused this damsel Hopkins to hie to her fainting couch? Why, the mere suggestion that there might be inherent differences between men and women when it comes to aptitude to the hard sciences.

There is no dispute that there aren't many women making a profession in the hard sciences.  Maybe this is because of prejudice, and maybe its something else.  If Ms. Hopkins can't handle an academic discussion about the possible "something elses" without getting all squeamish and stuff, I wonder how she got past dissecting frogs.

Comments

[df]

Way to miss the point! The reason Nancy wanted to puke when listening to Larry Lardo's speech is that he was emitting pseudoscientific economic mumbo jumbo. I reckon the poor woman had never listened to what passes for scholarship in the dismal science before. It can be quite a shock the first time you are exposed to the pseudoscientific, logically limp right wing propaganda they pass off as "economic science."

[Roscoe]

Jeez, where to start. First off, you can't seriously consider Larry Summers a right winger (last time I checked, the Clinton Treasury Department was not the secret headquarters of the right wing conspiracy). Second, while there are unquestionably some economists who are conservatives and libertarians, you have to occupy a pretty odd place on the political spectrum to consider the whole discipline "right wing". Does the name John Kenneth Galbraith ring any bells?
More importantly, the way civilized people react when they hear something they disagree with is not by falling into a faint, but by explaining why it is wrong.

[df]

Uh, Roscoe, she didn't faint. She said ephu to larry by getting up and leaving the room. Last time I checked, that was a tough, bold, brave thing to do, not a sissy hissy-fit kind of thing.

And while many economists are liberals, economic theory is comically, pathologically biased toward the right.

[Roscoe]

Deb - Thanks for stopping by again.
On your second point, we will just have to disagree on whether economics is a right wing plot.
On the first, I don't think its tough, bold and brave to storm out of an academic discussion because you don't agree with what's being said, I think it is childish and unprofessional. Maybe we just have to agree to disagree there as well.
Finally, Hopkins most certainly is claiming that Summers' talk made her "physically ill". (Her words, not mine. She also said that she had to leave because otherwise she would have "either blacked out or thrown up".

[Jean-Pierre Rivard]

Blaming a woman for having a sensitive reaction to a comment that directly and blindly judges the whole gender is a bit like blaming a jew for having a sensitive reaction to a comment that directly and blindly judges a whole religion like " why where the jews unable to defend themselves in germany, maybe they have a victim gene ".

[Roscoe]

Do you have some sort of citation for your statement that Summers "made a comment that directly and blindly judges" women? You know the old saying, you are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.

[Ferdinand Gajewski]

Would it have been too much to ask proponents of the feminist agenda at Harvard to think just a touch about the University's image beyond its walls? The current brouhaha is making Harvard appear foolish in the real world.

Alas a perception has been created that University researchers are not free to probe whether differences in aptitude exist between males and females. I for one have been empirically observing precisely such during four and a half decades of teaching.

Now thanks to President Summers' mea maxima culpa, the cat is out of the bag: one can not so much as mention perfectly legitimate hypotheses on America's "premier" university campus.

Years ago my dissertation topic, requiring almost daily communication by mail with a Communist state, was deemed--by the feds in this case--politically incorrect. Hundreds of scholarly responses to me from Warsaw were intercepted and held in a Chicago warehouse for months.

There is a plethora of Meshugenehs in the academy nowadays. Is it any wonder Mr. Summers' predecessor had to take time out to cope with depression?

Ferdinand Gajewski, PhD

[Ferdinand Gajewski]

http://www.womensfreedom.org/artic712.htm

[Ferdinand Gajewski]

With so much attention focused nowadays on the state of academe, I wonder if it might not be a propitious moment to revisit the issue of affirmative action as a tool in forming an entering student class (the Supreme Court of the United States notwithstanding).

A diversity of peers may well enrich the learning experience of college students. In my decades as a university teacher, though, I saw this is not necessarily the case, especially in the realm of social intercourse. Even at so diversity-obsessed an institution as Harvard, birds of a feather continued to flock together.

Even if diversity has value in the university setting, society must pay a price for it. Is there anyone, for example, who would not prefer being attended by a surgeon who was one of the most qualified candidates for admission to his medical school rather than someone less qualified who was admitted for diversity's sake?

Some view diversity in higher education as a means of redressing long-standing injustices. But giving minority college applicants--and women--more than is their due while giving nonminority applicants less is tantamount to an employer paying minority workers more than majority workers.

Social justice can be achieved properly or unethically. Shouldn't the academy be opting for the former?

Ferdinand Gajewski, PhD

[Ferdinand Gajewski]

A provocative piece:

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/walterwilliams/

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