Smash hit

Neuroscientists have long known that men and women process information differently, using differing parts of the brain. Other research has indicated that women, whether for environmental or innate neurological reasons, are less inclined to abstract thinking.

“A variety of data collected throughout the 1990s show that gonadal hormones . . . have demonstrable effects on the cognitive abilities of women and men,” wrote Diane Halpern, of California State University in San Bernardino, and Mary LaMay, of Loma Linda University, in a 2000 Educational Psychology Review article: “Converging evidence from a variety of sources supports the idea that prenatal hormone levels affect patterns of cognition in sex-typical ways.”

Against that, there is evidence internationally that females fare better at maths than they do in the US; in some countries, they actually outperform males.

All this, you would think, would be juicy material for some serious, quantitative analytical and comparative research, the very thing universities, especially richly endowed American universities, are supposed to excel at. But, sadly, the climate of opinion at Harvard and elsewhere precludes just that sort of open inquiry.

It is, of course, not just the nostrums of gender equality and identity that are sacrosanct at prestigious American universities. The same stifling orthodox constraints apply to the full range of political views. Universities have become echo chambers in which left-wing verities reverberate unanswered between professors, researchers and undergraduates.

A recent survey by the conservative magazine American Enterprise found the following eye-opening numbers: at Cornell there were 166 liberals, six conservatives; at Stanford, 151 liberals; at the University of California-Los Angeles, 141 liberals and nine conservatives.

Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University in Georgia, in an essay published last November in the Chronicle of Higher Education, said the bias was a self-reinforcing phenomenon of group-think. “The ordinary evolution of opinion — expounding your beliefs in conversation, testing them in debate, reading books that confirm or refute them — is lacking, and what should remain arguable settles into surety,” he wrote.

Bauerlein identified three elements among academics — what he called the common assumption, the false consensus and the law of group polarisation — that had turned US universities into intellectually homeogenous, left-wing reinforcement parade grounds.

Whole areas of study are, Soviet-style, barred from polite discussion, and if you take an opposing view, you can forget the idea of getting your doctoral thesis, still less a job there.

Larry Summers, to his credit, has taken on the loonies before. When he took over at Harvard three years ago one of his first acts was to challenge Cornel West, Professor of African-American studies and full-time agitator, over his research output (West had recently produced a radical hip-hop album and eventually left Harvard in high dudgeon).

But his assault on a woman’s right to deny the possibility of innate gender differences is clearly of a different order, as shown by his humiliating retreat from the most benign of intellectual observations. That really should be enough to make the rest of us throw up.