When Harvard University President Lawrence Summers suggested women might be innately less suited to scientific study than men he crossed a line that critics say is stifling U.S. academic freedom. Summers sparked a furor last month when he theorized that "intrinsic aptitudes" may explain why more men work in the academic sciences than women. Although he said he was intentionally trying to provoke and that he wanted to be proven wrong, his comments brought calls for his resignation from faculty and students who accused him of insensitivity. "Larry Summers is Exhibit A in how you can step into the culture of offense in American academic life," said David French of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. French said the dust-up over Summers's remarks had its roots in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when U.S. universities adopted laws aimed at prohibiting speech that would be offensive on the basis of race, gender and sexual orientation. "The paramount right (at U.S. colleges) has become the right not to be offended rather than the right to challenge convention and create a free marketplace of ideas," he said. --More 2024 Local Time 1724 GMT
