It’s been said in the United States that celebrities shouldn’t be using the limelight to state political opinions. It looks as though the president of Harvard University is expected to submit to the same etiquette. According to James Traub of The New York Times, Harvard University President and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers’ “provocative yodel” at an economics conference held on January 14 has “set off a worldwide avalanche of commentary and condemnation.”

Two op-ed pieces appearing in The New York Times by Olivia Judson and Charles Murray, respectively, are mavericks in the tide of controversy which, while ever-present in our country, Summers has somehow whipped into a frenzy by opening his mouth. Both Judson and Murray suggest that Summers’ comment should be entertained rather than dismissed as “a radical idea backed only by personal anecdotes and a fringe of cranks.” Scientific research in the field of innate male-female differences is one of the hottest around, and it is gaining momentum, according to Murray.

Unfortunately, at least as far as media representation is concerned, whether Summers had the right to  make such a controversial statement overshadows what Murray and Traub intimate is truly at stake: what Murray refers to as a “wholesale denial that certain bodies of scientific knowledge exist.”

In Traub’s article, Harvard Psychologist Steven Pinker expressed dismay that Summers’ suggestion, in which he states that “the low representation of women scientists at universities might stem from, among other causes, innate differences between the sexes,” might not be appropriate to academic discourse:

“Good grief, shouldn’t everything be within the pale of legitimate academic discourse, as long as it is presented with some academic rigor?”