Bok is Back!

Larry Summers has finally resigned.  Perhaps his run-in with the women on faculty was a factor in the decision.  Derek Bok is taking his place during the interim search. 

I think it's a good thing that Summers is out.  His comments about women's performance in the sciences were unwise, given his position and his location.  I'm not saying that he doesn't have a right to his opinion, or that his opinion is incorrect.  I'm saying that if you are the leader of a university that is struggling to attract and retain top women professors in math and science, and you're at an economic conference attended by those very women, it is unwise to suggest that innate brain differences, not prejudice, account for women's under-representation in universities.  It's just not the place or time to make that suggestion.  You really have to have a tin ear to not suspect that that wouldn't go over well in that setting.

So if he lacked judgment in similar settings and made political mistakes like that more than once (which he seems to have), it's really not appropriate to give him such a big and wonderful job.  I'm sure others will say he was witch-hunted out, or that Harvard is too "politically correct".  But in fact Summers was literally politically in-adept, in a way that no good CEO can afford to be -- he didn't know how to gauge the impact of his words on his audience.  As usual, that's just my two cents.