I find King Chwan-Chuen's (金傳春) article ("Cultivating women in academia, March 13, page 8) riddled with numerous conciliatory and ignorant remarks, although I don't think they were intentional.
In his efforts to praise and "promote" women's endeavors in these fields he forgets that his voice and ideas stem from a patriarchal understanding of the world, one that is unfavorable to and marginalizes women in every sphere of society, public and domestic. Patriarchy and its insidious ideology touches, affects and infects all of us. It is women and children who pay by far the heaviest price, however.
I also find amusing a question that arose at the male-dominated MIT conference: "What are the systemic causes of the problems we face?" I would like to respond by asking, "Who is `we,' white man?" Women have faced these problems all along and all alone, and continue in their struggle today to be heard and treated equally at all levels of society. It is men who perpetuate oppression against women and only recently with the advent of "politically correct" language have a few people realized this. Patriarchy is the systemic cause of the problems we face. Not just in universities, but in society; in the world.
The next question from MIT is even laughable: "What might we do (italics mine) collectively [to stop these problems from reoccurring]?" The question presupposes that men were never part of the problem, but injects a male-female collective known as "we." Might I suggest that men accept the blame for creating the glass ceiling, gross inequalities between men's and women's wages, abhorrent and discriminatory treatment of women in the so-called "hard sciences," math, physics and engineering. I could render a litany, but I won't.
As King is a professor in the health sciences he should also know that a registered nurse can do two-thirds the work of a doctor, but because of her "lesser" status, she earns the wages "fit" for such a position.
Kevin R. Larson
Tainan
Cultural purge not an answer
Although the symptoms among Taiwan's political and academic elite can be diagnosed, intellectual autism cannot be easily cured with a cultural purge. "Getting rid of such a culture," as Bob F.Y. Kuo (郭峰淵) put it (`Intellectual autism' plagues elite, March 18, page 8), is neither a meaningful nor structured form of therapy, especially when one is attempting something wider. Even if such a remedy were feasible, moreover, inverting, purging, reforming and reinventing a culture does not, and should not, have the primary purpose of advancing intellectual pursuits.
In his assessment of Taiwan's academic and political elite, Kuo pointed his axe in several directions. First, he stated in clear terms that "smart people" share a common thread, namely that "they are good at taking exams." He proceeded to infer that Taiwan's elite were substantially cunning, forwarding vacuous arguments with little or no public value. Perhaps this alone is an indication of how Kuo had misconstrued his first of many strawmen, since being smart has absolutely nothing to do with one's performance on and the outcome of annual national examinations. If one were to narrowly define smart as an ability to do well on exams, then such a definition would logically disqualify Einstein. It would also follow that a high school drop-out like Bill Gates was and still is, lacking smarts.
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