WOMEN AND SCIENCE AT YALE
GELERNT, DAVID
WOMEN AND SCIENCE AT YALE by David Gelernter AFFIRMATIVE ACTION seems to be entering a new phase: As the public turns against it, universities are growing increasingly desperate in their support....
...Our older boy has spent a couple of weeks during each of the past several summers in a Lego-and-computers course...
...The very notion is an Orwellian freedom-is-slavery inversion...
...That I could only be well and truly inspired by a Jewish professor...
...This is exactly what colleges across the country are doing today to their aspiring male athletes...
...If that's so, then boys must be specially close to male scientists...
...It degrades scientists by suggesting that they can't make it without a little help from Big Brother...
...The next step is frighteningly clear...
...A circular argument: We've got to get more women into science, because otherwise we won't be able to get more women into science...
...At the end of each session, students show off their accomplishments...
...Women didn't feel like it...
...Yale college happens to be heavily armored in foot-thick academic independence, and we have survived a long series of ideological barrages in better shape than we are usually given credit for...
...The result is a diversity crusade that insults women scientists and non-scientists...
...i teach at Yale, where the administration has made it clear that (in particular) it wants more female professors in technology and the hard sciences...
...i've never encountered one girl at any of these performances...
...And after it does fail...
...To do that, we need to understand why this issue has come up in the first place...
...History's greatest engineers, scientists, and mathematicians have nearly all been male...
...Otherwise, why monkey with female predilections...
...presumably because (by and large) they don't like these fields or (on average) don't tend to excel in them, which is nearly the same thing...
...The approaching hornet swarm is bad news for universities and society in general...
...That Christian students had an automatic "special relationship" to all the Christian professors...
...The administrators who are hot for affirmative action today will be hot for restricted admissions tomorrow...
...We ought to prepare and plan ahead...
...But whatever the outcome at this university, the Yale administration is doing the academic world no favor by joining the crowd that has gathered to poke and prod this particular hornets' nest...
...other universities have the same goal...
...if you believe that—that our tony, Democratic suburb is biased against little girls—then you'll believe anything...
...and degrades non-scientists by suggesting that they'd be in a different field altogether if they only had the guts...
...In any case, I can picture my own reaction if someone had told me that, say, I could only learn physics properly from a Jew...
...they have longed for women scientists for years, but their longing seems to have entered a new phase of grim determination...
...You can't force women to play if they don't want to...
...David Gelernter is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Some people claim that if we don't have more women science professors, we have no hope of luring more girls into science...
...Their attitude is either patronizing or bullying...
...Sound impossible...
...But everyone knows that anti-woman bigotry is not the explanation...
...Of course, modern culture amounts to one long harangue against female tastes...
...Can't believe that any college would dare tell your son, "forget that computer science course...
...Next step: male quotas on course enrollments and majors...
...Yet diversity promoters have decreed that, nonetheless, more women shall enter engineering and science...
...Hispanic applicants are available...
...Scientists and engineers are mainly grown-up versions of Lego-and-computers children...
...if your goal is a large increase in female science and engineering professors, you can't do it, because the candidates are not available...
...it's hardly surprising that the same message should underlie the latest trends in affirmative action...
...So if a spurious "equality" is your goal, your only choice in the long run is to jettison men's sports, as universities across the country now routinely do...
...Wounded ideologues (whose programs have been tried and failed) are the most dangerous kind...
...Are we quite sure we want to make this crazy claim...
...The public has been conditioned to take anything the bureaucrats dish out and like it...
...It's true that all professional football players are male, but that's different...
...In recent years, affirmative action pushers have been less inclined to accuse people of bigotry—per-haps because they know the accusation is insulting and false...
...Football is important...
...There is no such thing as a university powered by pure intellectual merit...
...Everyone who holds a good academic position owes it in some degree to luck...
...But none of these facts needed to be or ought to have been reflected in the demographics of the Yale faculty...
...Of course affirmative action proponents could define opposition to affirmative action as evidence of anti-woman bias in itself—but in doing so, they would merely be declaring themselves right by definition...
...If women aren't being kept out of science by force, they must be choosing not to enter, presumably because they don't want to...
...Because physics is more important than sports...
...We aren't defending a perfect system against an idea that would destroy it...
...But in low-profile, unimportant areas such as physics, the public doesn't care much about the players, and ideologues have a free hand...
...Whether or not you approve of affirmative action, it's clear that certain of its goals can be achieved and others can't...
...Can we show you something in Film Studies...
...In any case, the ditching of men's athletics proves that ideologues can undertake a policy that any normal person would regard as malicious and stupid and get away with it...
...I would have told such a person to drop dead...
...Even if there were, we wouldn't like it, because other kinds of merit (for example spiritual) count too...
...It's true that women are scarce in hard sciences and engineering...
...If universities are willing to jettison aspiring male athletes in the name of equality, why not aspiring male physicists...
...So what if we don't have a lot of female engineering and science professors...
...After it becomes clear that no large increase in numbers of female engineers and hard scientists is going to materialize...
...If you believe the Bigotry Theory, you must also believe that bigotry explains the scarcity of girls in our local Lego-and-computers group...
...The affirmative action pushers wanted more college women to play sports...
...pro-woman bias has been the rule in academia for a generation...
...And consider the implications of the underlying claim, that girls must have some sort of specially close relationship to female scientists...
...They're also less prone to the intense, cutthroat aggressiveness that usually marks the successful research scientist or engineer...
...The public schools run a summer program for children...
...The future is grim unless we start worrying about it right now...
...The real explanation is obvious: Women are less drawn to science and engineering than men are...
...The public wouldn't stand for it...
...if you are determined, say, to increase the proportion of Hispanics in your undergraduate population, you can probably do it...
...To what purpose are universities willing to inflict this damage...
...We are defending a fairly good system (and America's hard science and technology is fairly good) against an idea that is bound to fail and, along the way, to insult the people it's supposed to help...
...Yes I am closer to Jews than Christians in certain ways—and to parrot-lovers than cat-fanciers in certain other ways...
...we can't force weak players on the NFL merely for ideological reasons...
...if anti-woman bigotry were the explanation, we could increase our female-professor count by cutting down on the bigotry...
...Nowadays affirmative action is mainly justified by the need for "diversity...
...Many people, academics and otherwise, don't believe that...
...We opponents of affirmative action don't claim that we are defending a system of pure merit against a barbarian onslaught...
...we can't be a society where nearly all the engineering and hard science professors are male, because—we just can't...
...if you visit the comfortable, typical connecticut suburb where i live, you can see the big picture in microcosm...
...It's a nightmare, but we'd be foolish not to take it seriously...
...male enrollment is maxed out...
...Affirmative action pushers have obviously decided that some fields (namely, the ones males disproportionately prefer) are just better than others (namely, the ones women choose...
...Honorable people have put forward the "diversity" argument, but consider what this argument implies...
Vol. 4 • June 1999 • No. 38
