Foot in Mouth Disease: Committee lambasts Harvard chief's remark

This story has the Harvard Prez opening mouth and inserting foot. Trouble is that he seems to like the taste. Harvard University...institution of higher learning. NOT!//JW sends.

The suggestion by Harvard University's president that innate differences might explain why women lag in science and math could hurt efforts to recruit female scholars, a faculty committee said.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences' Standing Committee on Women told school president Lawrence H. Summers in a letter Tuesday that his remarks at a conference Friday did not "serve our institution well."

"Indeed, they serve to reinforce an institutional culture at Harvard that erects numerous barriers to improving the representation of women on the faculty, and to impede our current efforts to recruit top women scholars," the letter said. "They also send at best mixed signals to our high-achieving women students in Harvard College and in the graduate and professional schools."