Be very careful what you say:
Professor Tymms said: “The real difference is that boys have a far wider spread — in maths, there are more gifted and talented boys, but also more with special needs.”
Larry Summers got fired from Harvard for saying exactly that.
In
“The government is concerned about a growing gender gap in higher education, after 22,500 more young women than men won places at university last year [2006] . . . And last year, 57% of first degree graduates were women.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6314055.stm
It wasn’t like that in my day (unfortunately) when four something per cent went to uni.
The more people who say it the less the feminazis can shut down debate. It is because it happens so rarely that the thought police are so effective in crushing discussion, the more people who accept the Truth, and admit to it, the better. Little Lucy will always turn that GI Joe into a doll – everybody with a child knows that – but nobody says it because the Blank Slate world view reigns supreme in academia. Its dominance will only end when academics who know The Truth admit it.
Perhaps an even more curious factor in this is that boys from “poorer backgrounds” at school are less interested than girls in finding out what student life at uni is like:
“Less than half as many boys as girls have applied for summer schools that give them a flavour of university life. A scheme run by the Sutton Trust educational charity aims to encourage students from poorer backgrounds. But this year 1,467 girls applied and only 670 boys. Founder Sir Peter Lampl said: ‘Maybe they are too shy.’ . . The Sutton Trust pays for about 660 students from across the country to spend a week in July at a choice of Bristol, Cambridge, Nottingham, Oxford or St Andrews universities.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6577249.stm
The more reports like this that I come across, the more I’m inclined to think that George Orwell’s insight in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) still prevails:
“Working people often have a vague reverence for learning in others, but where ‘education’ touches their own lives they see through it and reject it by a healthy instinct. The time was when I used to lament over quite imaginary pictures of lads of fourteen dragged protesting from their lessons and set to work at dismal jobs. It seemed to me dreadful that the doom of a ‘job’ should descend upon anyone at fourteen. Of course I know now that there is not one working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will leave school. He wants to be doing real work, not wasting his time on ridiculous rubbish like history and geography. To the working class, the notion of staying at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely contemptible and unmanly.”
http://www.george-orwell.org/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/6.html
I was at some event at one of these posh Uni’s on the same day as some event for the new intake. The girls were all absolutely beautiful. Are rising female student numbers maybe just down to lecherous lecturers?
Posh unis?
This is DH Lawrence on his alma mater – and mine:
In Nottingham, that dismal town
where I went to school and college,
they’ve built a new university
for a new dispensation of knowledge.
Built it most grand and cakeily
out of the noble loot
derived from shrewd cash-chemistry
by good Sir Jesse Boot.
Little I thought, when I was a lad
and turned my modest penny
over on Boot’s Cash Chemist’s counter,
that Jesse, by turning many
millions of similar honest pence
over, would make a pile
that would rise at last and blossom out
in grand and cakey style
into a university
where smart men would dispense
doses of smart cash-chemistry
in language of common-sense!
That future Nottingham lads would be
cash-chemically B.Sc.
that Nottingham lights would rise and say:
-By Boots I am M.A.
From this I learn, though I knew it before
that culture has her roots
in the deep dung of cash, and lore
is a last off-shoot of Boots.
Nottingham’s New University, in Pansies (1929)
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/mss/online/online-exhibitions/exhib_dhl/b2.phtml
I dunno so much about lecherous lecturers – DH Lawrence famously ran off with Frieda Weekley (née von Richthofen), wife of the professor of modern languages at the college and sister of the German WW1 fighter ace.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._H._Lawrence
Passing to modern times, Sir Peter Mansfield FRS, professor of physics, was awarded the Nobel prize in 2003 for his work on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI scanners):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Mansfield
And Sir Clive Granger, a Nottingham graduate, was awarded a Nobel prize for economics in the same year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_W._J._Granger
Btw Sir Peter Mansfield failed his eleven plus and left school at the age of 15 to become an apprentice book-binder, which isn’t a bad start for a Nobel laureate.
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/neuroscience/general/news/ion_nl04_1203.pdf
Tim, this isn’t true you know. Summers lost his job because of incompetence. You might as well say that Charles Clarke was fired for being rude to Rachel’s dad.
Tim adds: OK D2. Show that’s why he was fired. You’ve (rightly) had the better of me on some subjects. Don’t think you will here (unless telling the truth to the Harvard faculty is “incompetence”)
He wasn’t even fired.
Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) – generally credited with being the first recognisable novelist in the English language – may have hit upon a simple but credible explanation of why there are relatively few women of widely recognised distinction. In 1719 he wrote:
“I have often thought of it as one of the most barbarous customs in the world, considering us as a civilized and a Christian country, that we deny the advantages of learning to women. We reproach the sex every day with folly and impertinence; while I am confident, had they the advantages of education equal to us, they would be guilty of less than ourselves.”
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1719defoe-women.html
With few opportunities for access to education, women became dependent for income support from their families and husbands or lovers unless they turned to crime, as did Jenny Diver (aka Mary Young c.1700-1741), a renown pick-pocket in her time until she was hanged at Tyburn, pursued careers of the like of the heroine in Daniel Defoe’s novel: Moll Flanders (1722), succeeded as actresses after the theatre became fashionable or managed to become the more-or-less permanent mistresses of rich or powerful men, as did Nell Gwynn (1650-1687).
In the English language, we haven’t lacked women novelists of distinction but then Jane Austen (1775-1817) and the Bronte sisters (Charlotte 1816-55) were fortunate in having enlightened clergymen as fathers who were committed to educating their respective daughters. In a woman novelist of distinction, the Japanese were way ahead of us. Shikibu Murasaki (? 973-1025) , a lady-in-waiting to the Empress Akiko, wrote the celebrated Tale of Genji in c. 1000 about the lives and loves of the Heian Court in Japan.
We have in history several examples of outstanding women rulers, such as Elizabeth I (1533-1603), Queen of England, who “received her education under Roger Ascham. She came to speak and read six languages: her native English, as well as French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, and Latin. Elizabeth was an avid reader and often spent hours reading Greek or Latin literature.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_I_of_England
There was Catherine the Great (1729-96), Empress of Russia and, of course, in medieval times, there was also Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204).
Wikipedia (yes, I know) lists seven factors that may have driven Summers’ resignation, of which the gender controversy is listed as #4:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers#Controversies
Ummm John….
That list is merely a general resume of controversies throughout his life and is very clearly NOT a direct list of the controversies that influenced his resignation from Harvard.
The first in that list refers to his time at the World Bank. Not even remotely relevant.
The Cornel West and anti-Israel comments were in respectively 2001 and 2002.
The difference between sexes controversy arose in January 2005.
The lack of confidence motion was in March 2005, barely two months after the sexes issue, yet 14 years, 4 years and 3 years respectively after your first three mentions.
If the sexes issue was so unimportant, why did it lead so quickly to the censure?
If your job is to be the manager and leader of Harvard University, and you cannot command the respect and obedience of the faculty of Harvard University, then you are not competent for your job.
Gerald Ratner told the truth about cheap jewellery, but I don’t think anyone would suggest that he wasn’t fairly fired.
Tim adds: So Summers was fairly fired because the faculty of a universtiy were not happy to hear the truth?
Summers wasn’t fired.
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