Summers Releases Transcript of Talk

In a bow to mounting faculty pressure, University President Lawrence H. Summers yesterday released a transcript of his controversial remarks on women in science last month.

The nearly 7,000-word transcript generally confirms previous accounts of the speech, in which Summers suggested “issues of intrinsic aptitude” might be responsible for the underrepresentation of female scientists. In his remarks, Summers said he was deeply skeptical of discrimination as a possible cause of the phenomenon.

The transcript’s release came exactly one month after Summers’ remarks were first publicized and set off a barrage of faculty criticism that threatened the viability of his administration.

In a letter to the Faculty yesterday, Summers once again apologized for the speech, which came at a Jan. 14 conference at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

“Though my NBER remarks were explicitly speculative, and noted that ‘I may be all wrong,’ I should have left such speculation to those more expert in the relevant fields,” Summers wrote.

Addressing his critics, whose piercing attacks at Tuesday’s Faculty meeting went well beyond his remarks on women in science, Summers said he was open to dissent on all fronts.

“In this University, people who disagree with me—or with anyone else—should and must feel free to say so,” Summers wrote.

James R. Houghton ’58, senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, released his own letter to the Harvard community yesterday afternoon expressing confidence in Summers.

“We take seriously the views expressed at Tuesday’s meeting and recognize their intensity,” Houghton wrote. “President Summers has made plain to us that he is listening carefully to the concerns that have been expressed. We are confident of his ability to work constructively with the faculty and others to advance the goal that all of us share—ensuring that Harvard’s academic programs are as good as they can be, and that our community of faculty, students, and staff is as strong as it can be, now and in the future.”

The letter marked the first official public statement by the Corporation since the uproar over Summers’ remarks began. Houghton did not return phone calls seeking further comment last night.

Summers had for weeks resisted calls to release a tape or transcript of his remarks, saying the conference had been off the record.

As recently as Tuesday, when several professors renewed their calls for a release of the transcript, Summers said, “I have believed to date that it is not best to try to parse in detail a statement that was a set of informal remarks that were not even written out before they were delivered and were not intended to be quoted.”

The transcript’s release came in advance of a rare follow-up meeting of the Faculty on Tuesday in which professors are expected to voice further discontent with Summers’ leadership of the University.

While several of the president’s critics said yesterday they were pleased to see the transcript released, they said their concerns extended far beyond Summers’ comments on women in science.

Three Hypotheses

In his remarks last month, Summers suggested three “broad hypotheses” to account for the dearth of women who study and take jobs in science and engineering.

“One is what I would call the...high-powered job hypothesis,” Summers said, explaining that familial obligations often prevent women from taking jobs that require too large a time commitment—as much as 80 hours a week in the case of scientists, Summers said.

A Crimson reporter yesterday verified the transcript provided by Summers’ office against an audiotape of the remarks. Only inconsequential false starts and repeated words were omitted.

The president’s second—and ultimately most controversial—hypothesis focused on what he referred to as “different availability of aptitude at the high end.”

Elaborating on that explanation, Summers said, “It does appear that on many, many different human attributes—height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability—there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means, which can be debated, there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population.”

He did not use the phrase “innate differences,” which emerged as key buzzwords in the ensuing controversy over his remarks. Summers used that phrase in later media interviews describing the speech.

Summers third hypothesis focused on “different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search,” a theory to which he bestowed relatively little importance.

“If there was really a pervasive pattern of discrimination that was leaving an extraordinary number of high-quality potential candidates behind,” Summers said, “one suspects that in the highly competitive academic marketplace, there would be more examples of institutions that succeeded substantially by working to fill the gap.”

‘Daddy Truck’

In the month of uproar over Summers’ remarks, critics have largely focused their outrage on his suggestion that gender differences might account for the underrepresentation of women in science.

“Particularly in some attributes that bear on engineering,” Summers said, “there is reasonably strong evidence of taste differences between little girls and little boys that are not easy to attribute to socialization.”

He added, “So, I think, while I would prefer to believe otherwise, I guess my experience with my two-and-a-half-year-old twin daughters who were not given dolls and who were given trucks, and found themselves saying to each other, ‘Look, daddy truck is carrying the baby truck,’ tells me something.”

Challenging his speech in a question-and-answer session that followed, Denice D. Denton, chancellor of the University of California-Santa Cruz, said, “You know, a lot of us would disagree with your hypothesis and your premises.”

“Fair enough,” replied Summers.

“So it’s not so clear,” Denton said.

“It’s not clear at all. I think I said it wasn’t clear. I was giving you my best guess, but I hope we could argue on the basis of as much evidence as we can marshal.”

The transcript provided by Summers’ office yesterday did not name Denton as the questioner, but Catherine J. Didion, director of the International Network of Women Engineers and Scientists and a conference attendee, said it was Denton.

Posing an ironically prescient query to Summers, Donna J. Nelson, associate professor of chemistry at the University of Oklahoma, asked if a transcript of the president’s remarks would be released.

“I noticed it’s being recorded, so I hope that we’ll be able to have a copy of it,” Nelson said. “That would be nice.”

“We’ll see,” Summers said to laughter from the audience.

—Daniel J. Hemel, William C. Marra, and Sara E. Polsky contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Zachary M. Seward can be reached at seward@fas.harvard.edu.