Felix Salmon reviews Lawrence Summers’ Harvard presidency (get all the details you want by typing any phrase from his sentence into this blog’s search engine).
He forgets to mention his fabled multi-tasking. As Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times: “That the highly paid leader of arguably America’s most esteemed educational institution … would simultaneously freelance as a hedge-fund guy might stand as a symbol for the values of our time.”
But anyway, everyone’s talking, today, about Summers’ use, in a recent interview, of the word asshole to describe two notorious Harvard students – the Winklevoss twins:
If an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o’clock, there are two possibilities. One is that they’re looking for a job and have an interview; the other is that they are an asshole. This was the latter case.
So there’s a wee wumpus this morning about a treasury secretary and a university president and all calling someone an asshole. Who cares. But what this does do is allow me to share with you one of my favorite scientific articles. It originally appeared in the Journal of Irreproducible Results, and has been collected in a book called Sex as a Heap of Malfunctioning Rubble.
***************************************
Title: THE AH GENE: Implications for Genetic Counseling
Excerpts: “[We wish to discuss] evidence supporting the existence of a gene (henceforth called the AH gene) that predisposes an individual to chronic behavior in an obnoxious, boorish, selfish, overbearing, and generally offensive manner…. [T]he percentage of adults in the United States exhibiting chronic AH behavior is about 32% (95% confidence interval, 27-37%)… [Being] a carrier of one of … three genotypes is strongly associated with exhibiting chronic AH behavior (i.e. with being phenotypically a “real AH”)… [It] can be argued that almost all of the world’s problems are due to some degree to the influence of the AH gene….”
July 22nd, 2011 at 11:32AM
Summer’s quotation does have the virtue of being 100%, unimpeachably true. So he has that going for him.
dcat
July 23rd, 2011 at 1:27AM
I’m hardly a fan of Summers, but this post isn’t fair to him.
I can’t imagine how any outsider could evaluate Summers’ performance as the President of Harvard. There’s no obvious metric one could use, and even if there were, the question would be how does Summers compare to Bok and Gilpin.
Summers might or might not have been promoted above his abilities, but what you’ve quoted in the headline seems to me to be more snark than substance. You and Salmon are assuming that the readership has more familiarity with the facts than you have a right to assume.
Probably only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the general public knows anything (or would care very much) about the interest rate swaps or the Shleifer incident. And even those who do know something about those matters, probably don’t know enough to know how much to blame Summers.
As for Summers’s comment about women scientists, it was much ado about nothing.