An Open Letter to Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers

Dear President Summers,

My sympathies were with you, initially. It seems clear you have been treated unfairly by women who agreed to a private, off-the-record meeting, but who, when you raised ideas with which they disagreed, betrayed your trust, behaved rudely, and tried to silence even the suggestion of dissent. These women behaved very badly, indeed.

But you, sir, behaved worse.

Just how low an opinion of the female sex do you have, that you not only tolerate but reward ill manners, moral cowardice, and intellectual weakness in women? Are your expectations of us so low? How dare the leader of one of the foremost research institutions in the nation value Truth less than preserving the eggshell egos of a handful of fragile feminists?

As the President of Harvard, your responsibility is to cultivate civility, moral courage, and intellectual rigor in faculty and students—irrespective of sex; it is your charge to preserve the free and reasoned exchange of ideas, especially controversial ideas, and to decry the silencing of dissent.

You have chosen to fail on all counts.

When that silly woman stormed out of the meeting, you should have called her on it, then and there. You’re being paid to be an authority figure, and should act like one. You should have announced to her receding back that she was behaving badly, that she has a responsibility to young people and to truth as well as to herself, to stand her ground and through argument and evidence demonstrate how your ideas were flawed. When the press came to you for comment, you should have used the opportunity to focus attention not on the petty tyrants who would silence dissent, but on the scholars who delight in the free play of ideas.

Instead, your relentless penitence announces to the world that, as far as Harvard is concerned, women are not to be expected to behave civilly, when confronted by ideas with which they disagree; that, when women are rude, their rudeness should be answered not with criticism, but with endless apologies and chatter about sensitivity, as if we’re too emotionally fragile to tolerate criticism; and that even those of with Ph.D.s should not be expected to defend their opinions with scholarship and argument but are, rather, to be placated and agreed with. What condescension, sir, what utter contempt for women such a view betrays.

“I've realized that this was a case where the good academic value of challenging and provoking thought just went where it should not have gone," you remarked in one of your many apologies. ''I was wrong in my comments."

In those, Mr. Summers, you were not wrong—as C. Vann Woodward observed famously, “The purpose of a university is not to make its members feel secure, content, or good about themselves, but to provide a forum for the new, the provocative, the disturbing, the unorthodox, even the shocking. . . . It is a place where the unthinkable can be thought, the unmentionable can be discussed, and the unchallengeable can be challenged.”

I shall leave you, Mr. Summers, with some good advice once offered during Morning Prayers at Harvard:

What a wise insight—that evidence, not pressure, should change minds.

But of course you’re already familiar with these eloquent words, Mr. Summers: they are yours: (Morning Prayers address, Appleton Chapel, Memorial Church, September 20, 2004.)

Cordially,

Laurie Morrow, Ph.D.