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Earl Aagaard’s opinions about everything that interests him. Og also enjoys gardening, travel, reading, woodbutchery, and lots of other stuff.

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LARRY SUMMERS GETS SOME SUPPORT…....

The President of Harvard has been hearing members of his faculty call for his resignation or firing after he suggested that the male/female imbalance in top-flight mathematics and engineering professors might be due to something other than discriminatory practices of the “old boys”. I don’t think that Susan Polgar had him in mind when she did this interview, but her perspective is a lot more sensible than what we’re hearing from the feminists on Harvard’s faculty, as well as others in the “movement”. From an OPINION JOURNAL.COM article:

Ms. Polgar is not someone who sees the two sexes as the same. “I think women are built differently and approach life very differently,” she told me. And in a 2002 column for ChessCafe.com, she took on what might now be called the Lawrence Summers question. “If we talk about pure abilities and skills, I believe there should be no reason why women cannot play as well as men,” Ms. Polgar wrote, but she went on to list various reasons that more female players have not reached chess’s highest ranks—among them their biological clocks, narrower opportunities to compete, cultural and gender bias, and the fact that “for years, women have set much lower standards” for themselves in chess than men. “If you do not put in the same work, you can’t compete at the same level,” she said then.

Read the whole article—she has a clear-eyed understanding of the bias that she has been subjected to, along with a recognition that this doesn’t explain everything about who’s a grandmaster and who’s not. And she’s DOING something about the problem, as well:

Two years ago, she founded her nonprofit Susan Polgar Foundation to promote chess to young people nationwide, with a special focus on girls. This year, more than 3,000 of them will participate in regional qualifying events for the second Susan Polgar National Invitational for Girls. The University of Texas at Dallas will award a full four-year scholarship to the highest finishing player who has not yet graduated from high school when the tournament is held in Phoenix this August. She also is looking for support, both from donations and from politicians, for her foundation’s Excel Through Chess program, which aims to introduce chess to every child in every school to help them do better in their studies and in life.

Ms. Polgar is only one of three sisters playin chess at a very high level. What a
GREAT STORY

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/07 at 10:30 AM

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