Churchill Good, Summers Bad

I recently questioned a colleague about her knee-jerk condemnation of Summers in comparison to her knee-jerk embracing of Churchill and she looked at me, stunned, and said "But Summers was wrong." I asked if she thought Churchill was wrong. "Not exactly wrong--I mean, I don't agree, but he is coming from a different viewpoint and trying to provoke discussion." We kept coming back to the same assessment--Summers was flat out wrong, knew he was wrong, was being willfully derogatory (Why would he do this? He's a cad) and should lose his job. But Churchill has a mantle of authenticity because of his position within the academic hierarchy--so while Summers is offensive, to some criminally so, Churchill fills the revered academic role of the counter-establishment provocateur and must be protected. Or what? What terrible thing would happen if the debate on the role of women in academia that Summers invited actually occurred, or if an under-qualified and scurrilous media hound of a professor was dismissed for poor scholarship and personal fraud?

"But Summers was wrong."