http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2005/02/the_summers_con.html As always, there were many illuminating comments. I shall try to respond to a few, but I want first to direct readers to the article in this morning's New York Times about the controversy. In it we learn that Summers... en-us http://www.christopher.mallow.name/dailyokie/2005/02/poor-choice-of-words-ii-academia-vs.html This leads us down a dangerous path: the idea that there really ARE no differences between one human being and another. Mind over matter. We reinforce this idea with our children from birth: "You can do whatever you want to do or be whatever you want... http://americandigest.org/sidelines/archives/2005/02/that_rigid_acad.html THAT RIGID ACADEMIC FLAB Today in the United States, most of the leading research universities are dominated by persons well to the left of Larry Summers, and they don't take kindly to having their ideology challenged, as Summers has now... http://thenudnikfile.blogspot.com/2005/02/intellectual-diversity.html A thriving and diverse intellectual community is essential for a functioning democracy to thrive. Unfortunately, the intellectual community in the form of the Universities in the US is anything but diverse. http://thekeymonk.blogspot.com/2005/02/what-larry-summers-flap-says-about.html His honor is correct that the academic (and political) Left is intellectually flaccid. But that matters surprisingly little, unfortunately. Because the academics reside in their own echo-chamber ivory-towers and control access to the professoriat for t... http://www.pejmanesque.com/archives/009314.html Roger Kimball argues that the kerfuffle over Ward Churchill obscures the real issue. He sees as the general problem the politicization of academia--a politicization of which Ward Churchill is only an indication or symptom. The most effective way to cou... http://macguyver.nbpfaus.net/~pfau/blog/archives/42-Intellectual-Atrophy.html By refusing to accept any arguments against their position, the left steadily becomes less and less able to defend its own. As John Stuart Mill pointed out in On Liberty, when one's ideas are not challenged, one's ability to defend them weakens. Not be http://decision08.blogspot.com/2005/02/miscellanea-women-and-sciences-edition.html You've probably heard of the storm of controversy Harvard President Lawrence Summers stirred up when he suggested recently that perhaps there was a biological reason that women are not attracted to the sciences as much as men. Martin Peretz of the Ne... http://powerlineblog.com/archives/009467.php Richard Posner has this to say, among other things, about the Lawrence Summers controversy at Harvard: Today in the... http://www.hayekcenter.org/prestopunditarchive/005733.html have tenure. Is the idea behind tenure that it is suppose to protect us from politicized schools? Then tenure is an utter failure at securing its ostensible objective --... http://www.garyjones.org/mt/archives/000132.html Robert Conquest's The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History sounds interesting so I've ordered it. Like his earlier work The Great Terror, 1968 and subsequent works such as The Harvest of Sorrow it is being met with ini...