The news came from Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard University, that girls aren’t as smart as boys when it comes to math and stuff. Therefore, it is cause for rejoicing that, during his four-year reign, the proportion of tenured jobs offered to women at Harvard has fallen to 13 per cent from 36 per cent, and last year, only four of the 32 tenured jobs went to women.

Surprise, Lawrence. We can do the math. We’ve been doing it for decades now.

The funny part is that Mr. Summers made the speech at a private conference on how women are doing in science and engineering (subtitled “real bad if I have a say in it”). The guy who invited him to speak, Harvard economist Richard Freeman, author of The Overeducated American (I’m saying nothing), said he wanted Mr. Summers to be “provocative,” which is known in newsrooms as deliberately writing something stupid to get a rise out of readers. Provocation is a bone I refuse to toss you. Lawrence Summers didn’t just bite at his, he regurgitated it. ‘Tis a sad thing.

I’ve always found the idea of the American Ivy League to be risible. Now, they no longer even claim intellectual superiority themselves. Prof. Freeman praises Mr. Summers in these terms: He is “a straight-talking, no-baloney president.”

That’s what I look for in an intellectual, none of that sidewinder-glancing, pressed-pork-meats nonsense that Susan Sontag was so famous for. I want a male who lands on a fallacy like a water snake on a sow bug, the fallacy being that women can string thoughts together — like mental “addition” — when everyone knows they count on their fingers and as for their heads, nature abhors a vacuum and so do guys, so they just hire somebody to clean, gosh my brain’s all a-squitters.

Mr. Summers said it was the size of the candidate pool that mattered, “not how much the size of the pool was held down by discrimination,” which shows his strength is neither physics nor consistency of metaphor. What he meant to say was that gals are busy raising their kids, so they don’t want big important jobs with huge salaries and freedom of intellectual expression.

This foolish boy unable to distinguish between education and training and the joys of combining the two once told The Globe and Mail‘s John Allemang that it’s dreadful that “you can’t call yourself educated if you don’t know five plays from Shakespeare, but you can call yourself educated if you don’t know the difference between a gene and a chromosome.” I know both, and I’m not a freak among my fellow females.

But it’s Shakespeare’s history plays that informed me that the United States invading Afghanistan, Iraq and then Iran in a nuclear world is a bad idea. Genes and chromosomes will be irrelevant after that. Humans shall lie in mud that wriggles, give birth to spotted earthworms the size of a mastodon’s kneecap, look down and scream forever.

Mr. Summers told his audience that he had given his daughter two trucks. She had named them mummy and daddy trucks and treated them like dolls. Quod erat demonstrandum, case proved, my daughter is an idiot, is his conclusion. QED, big mistake, Mr. Summers. She named her vehicles. Guys do that.

I had a similar experience with my little niece; she used the shiny green industrial toy forklift I gave her to transport her dolls from place to place. I call that smart.

She had not done what two boys I know did, which was take two trucks and say, “Let’s play a game called Crush and, if you say okay three times, I go to the next level,” and bash his little playmate’s head between the forklifts until his father rushed in to put a stop to it, for wise parents no longer say, “Boys will be boys.”

So, those boys get tenure and the girls don’t?

The audience was about half female — which is ridiculous, who let them in? — and some of them, including a lady from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (and doing real well there) and the girl president of the University of California at Santa Cruz, were, frankly, icy. “I have heard men make comments like this my entire life,” the MIT prof said, and if she’d listened to them, she’d have done nothing with her life. The MIT lady was tight-lipped. She said she was leaving before she blacked out.

In Britain, where they still have real universities despite Thatcher-Blair, things were going the other way. They’re worried that research shows boys are growing up dumber than a pickled egg and they’re slower than girls to read, add or sit up without couch support. In America, this is normal, but in Britain, they ponder the matter.

“My own personal view,” the chairman (for he is a man) of the Commons Education Committee said after much deliberation, “is that women are brighter than men. We should celebrate this, shouldn’t we? The brightest kids are coming through and they happen to be women.”

Thank you, MP Barry Sheerman. The cleverest men all flock to hear a woman’s thoughts, and many are not ashamed to say this.

May Mr. Summers and Prof. Freeman bash each other’s empty heads in all night long with high-tech shovels and drown in the liquid of their own self-love. The rest of us will dine with arts and science, with education and training, with both Caliban and Miranda, with historian Simon Schama, astronaut Roberta Bondar, writers Helen Simpson, Richard Dawkins and Alice Munro, designer Thomas Heatherwick, world-shakers Naomi Klein and Margaret Atwood, and drink a toast to Marie Curie and to Rosalind Franklin, the dark lady of DNA.

It’s the club that would never have Lawrence Summers as a member. It’s full of brilliant women. He’s too thick to join and it’s too clever to have him.