He addresses the point head-on: "Diverse teams make better decisions than homogenous ones. I won’t recap the academic research that underlies this assertion; for that, you should read James Surowecki’s excellent Wisdom of Crowds.
I am not unfamiliar with that research. I'm just not very impressed by it, particularly with the relevance of it to the issue at hand.
An awful lot of academic writing about diversity starts with the conclusion and then finds results to justify it. I mean, hypothetically supposing one were to do a double-blind study of pick-your-favorite-improvement and find, to your surprise, that it resulted in more skew, not less. ("We scrubbed all the resumes of any indication of race/gender and ended up inviting more white males to interviews?! Dude, WTF.")
Would you want that study to be in your CV when tenure decisions were being made, knowing what you do about the shadow beliefs of the people on your tenure committee? Bury that data and bury it deep if you value your career.
Incidentally, some sources of repeatable bias in academic studies are actually documented in the literature (whoa, meta!) For example, people have a tendency to not publish null results and just file them away in a desk drawer, which means the published literature in e.g. marketing systematically exaggerates the magnitude of effects. If your team is doing A/B testing and every test moves the needle something is almost certainly wrong, but in the literature something almost invariably moves the needle.
Larry Summers would publish that paper. What about all those researchers who already have tenure? There are plenty of academics who are willing to challenge the status quo on thinking if they believe they found evidence to the contrary. It would then be their duty to explain why something like that might happen. In your example perhaps it could be associated with a white people generally still having more opportunities throughout their lives in education (better schools on average), job experience (better jobs on average) and perhaps other factors. They could even spin that into people aren't being given an equal chance based on race and there is lasting effects throughout people's lifetime. The RESULT is the same: people hire more white people in blind tests, but the call for action is different.
Larry Summers as in "forced out of Harvard with the precipitating event being that he suggested there might be an outside possibility that differences in female participation in science are caused by differences in female's motivation to pursue science" Larry Summers? He would not be the first example I'd bring up in defense of the academy's willingness and ability to tolerate heretics. He had tenure, he has status, he was the flipping President of Harvard, he had just about everything going for him an academic possibly could. And that still didn't save his job when he said something the academy didn't like.
I thought about not writing that but decided it would probably be good bait to see if you were going to actually look at the rest or not and actually comment on substance. You make it sound like he lost his status and his job. He simply got a different position at Harvard and works with Obama, real step down.
