What Harvard Finds Unfit to Print - 10/18/00

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subject: What Harvard Finds Unfit to Print - 10/18/00

from: Smart Marriages

Wall Street Journal

October 18, 2000   

Commentary 

What Harvard Finds Unfit to Print
By Stanley Kurtz, a fellow at the Hudson Institute.

In the ivory tower today, the idea that marriage is good is apparently
considered an extremist notion. On the other hand, the idea that there are
few real differences between normal men and convicted rapists is regarded as
cutting-edge theory. That, at least, seems to be the conclusion of Harvard
University Press, which recently, and under highly unusual circumstances,
rejected an important new book on the benefits of marriage.

The book -- "The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier,
Healthier, and Better Off Financially" -- is by Linda Waite and Maggie
Gallagher, and has just been published, to considerable fanfare, by
Doubleday. It was expected, until a few months ago, to be published by
Harvard University Press. It dropped the book, however, and therein hangs a
tale, one of political correctness run riot.

At a press like Harvard, a manuscript is reviewed by two scholars. If the
reviews are positive, the book is slated for publication, pending final
approval by the board, which is normally a formality. But with "The Case for
Marriage," the press's Board of Syndics stepped in to kill the book because
-- according to the anonymous board critique -- its tone was too strong and
its evidence too meager.

To anyone who compares "The Case for Marriage" with other books Harvard has
proudly published, this is hard to swallow. Although the book is certainly a
direct assault on several cherished feminist myths, its tone is measured.
Whether arguing that staying married is better for children, or that
husbands don't damage their wives' mental health, Ms. Waite and Ms.
Gallagher write clearly, and calmly, and let their evidence speak for
itself.

So how was such a work, hailed as "the most important book in the family
field that has been published in many years" by one of Harvard's own
internal scholarly reviewers, rejected at the last minute? It's hard not to
suspect politics at play here, especially considering the tone of other
books to which the Harvard board was pleased to give its imprimatur.

After all, Harvard has published no less than four books by Catharine
MacKinnon, the radical feminist, whose core argument is that male sexual
desire is a close cousin of rape -- whether women consent to sex or not.
Reviewing her last Harvard Press book, Walter Berns, the political theorist,
remarked that Ms. MacKinnon's argument expresses a thoroughgoing hatred of
men. If scholarly tone is the issue, compare Ms. MacKinnon's rhetoric on sex
to Ms. Waite and Ms. Gallagher's:

Ms. MacKinnon: "What in the liberal view looks like love and romance looks a
lot like hatred and torture to the feminist."

Ms. Waite and Ms. Gallagher: "What these prominent researchers found may
shock you: Married people have both more and better sex than singles do. . .
. The answer, both theory and evidence suggest, is that the secret
ingredient marriage adds is commitment."

Which sounds to you more like unscientific extremism?

Let's examine the charge of weak evidence. The press board seized upon the
failure of Ms. Waite and Ms. Gallagher to prove causal connections, rather
than mere correlations. But virtually no sociological study can do that.

Proof that marriage increases a man's earning power would require the random
assignment of a group of men to marriage and bachelorhood, and then a
calculation of their earnings. In a review, the social scientist James Q.
Wilson concluded that, despite the impossibility of running controlled
experiments with human beings, Ms. Waite and Ms. Gallagher's evidence
strongly suggests the benefits of marriage are real.

Ms. MacKinnon, for her part, has been criticized by such legal luminaries as
Richard Posner for the thin evidentiary basis of her sweeping claim that
pornography leads to violence. "There is no evidence that pornography does
no harm," she writes, reduced to lurching for the double negative for
support.

Frustrated when an experiment shows convicted rapists and normal men respond
to pornography in similar ways, Ms. MacKinnon argues that controlled
experiments are useless because most normal men are undetected or latent
rapists anyway. Would you accept that assertion, while finding Ms. Waite and
Ms. Gallagher guilty of not proving causal relationships?

Besides Ms. MacKinnon, Harvard has published many deeply controversial books
on sexual issues. In his book "Homos," for example, the literary theorist
Leo Bersani explores gay sadomasochism and pederasty. Mr. Bersani's point is
that homosexuality, by its very nature, disrupts society -- and that this is
a good thing. The only books Harvard seems not to publish are those critical
of feminism. Is that why Harvard's board turned down "The Case for
Marriage"?

I asked Mary Ann Glendon, a Harvard law professor and past member of the
Board of Syndics, how unusual it was for the board to kill a book in this
way. Careful to acknowledge that she had no official statistics, she said
that she couldn't recall a single instance of rejection by the board in her
nearly five years of service. If there were problems, said Ms. Glendon, the
book was simply referred back to the author for revisions.

Although Press spokesman Mary-Kate Maco maintained that "books are turned
down at all stages," she acknowledged that "it is rare for a book to be
rejected at [this] level." The press refused to release a list of board
members, declining further comment on grounds of confidentiality.

What could Harvard's real objections to "The Case for Marriage" possibly be?

The early response by elite feminist reviewers may be suggestive. Slate's
Katha Pollit panned the book absurdly as a "clip job." And in the New York
Times Book Review, Margaret Talbot took only a single short paragraph to
dismiss the book as mere "anti-divorce polemics."

Nothing could be further from the truth. "The Case for Marriage" is packed
with scholarly evidence. The book enrages orthodox feminists because of what
it says -- that marriage matters -- and not the way it says it. The tragedy
is that efforts to suppress this book have been made, not simply by popular
polemicists, but by America's foremost university -- Harvard -- an
institution designed to sustain open and honest debate.

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