"I know of no community as committed to free inquiry as this one," wrote Larry Summers in a letter of apology to the Harvard faculty in mid-February. It was a moment straight out of Darkness at Noon. For it is his own commitment to free inquiry that has left the former secretary of the US Treasury, who became president of Harvard in 2001, begging to keep his job.

During an off-the-record talk to a conference of the National Bureau of Economic Research in January, Mr Summers offered three hypotheses for why women tend not to get high posts in the hard sciences: compromises related to family, differences in scientific aptitude and discrimination. He discarded the third hypothesis by drawing on the work of the economist Gary Becker, the Chicago Nobel laureate: "If it was really the case that everybody was discriminating," Mr Summers said, "there would be very substantial opportunities for a limited number of people who were not prepared to discriminate to assemble remarkable departments of high-quality people at relatively limited cost, simply by the act of their not discriminating."