You don’t want to get George Will all riled up:
…Someone like MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins, the hysteric (see above) who, hearing Summers, “felt I was going to be sick. My heart was pounding and my breath was shallow.” And, “I just couldn’t breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill.” She said that if she had not bolted from the room, “I would’ve either blacked out or thrown up.”
Is this the fruit of feminism? A woman at the peak of the academic pyramid becomes theatrically flurried by an unwelcome idea and, like a Victorian maiden exposed to male coarseness, suffers the vapors and collapses on the drawing room carpet in a heap of crinolines until revived by smelling salts and the offending brute’s contrition?
Hopkins’s sufferings, although severe, were not incapacitating: She somehow found strength quickly to share them with the Boston Globe and the “Today” show, on which she confided that she just did not know whether she could bear to have lunch with Summers. But even while reeling from the onslaught of Summers’s thought, she retained a flair for meretriciousness: She charged that Summers had said “that 50 percent” of “the brightest minds in America” do not have “the right aptitude” for science.
A nice conclusion to a week of false consciousness about science, gender politics, and the human brain.