“Math 55” is the kind of class I thought only exists in college nightmares. Described in the Harvard University catalogue as “probably the most difficult undergraduate math class in the country,” it meets for three hours a week, but homework is a whopping 24 to 60 hours a week. In 2006, the class started with 51 students. Three weeks into the semester, only 21 were left.

This academic boot camp description of Math 55 comes via Christina Hoff Sommers, writing in The American magazine. Sommers isn’t interested in college war stories, but in the demographics of the 21 students who made it past the third week of class. The group wasn’t exactly a cross-section of America—it was 45 percent Jewish, 18 percent Asian and 100 percent male. That’s right—not one woman left standing. In fact, only 17 women have completed the course since 1990, according to Sommers.

Women now earn the majority of bachelors and masters degrees, as well as most research PhD’s, says Sommers. But in the hard sciences, the picture is different. Women make up only “19 percent of tenure-track professors in math, 11 percent in physics, 10 percent in electrical engineering, and 10 percent in computer science,” according to Sommers.

These numbers, of course, have the gender-equity forces on the war-path. The howls reached a crescendo on October 17, 2007, when a House subcommittee in Washington, D.C,. held hearings to learn “why women are ‘underrepresented’ in academic professorships of science and engineering and to consider what the federal government should do about it,” writes Sommers. It surprised no one when all of the testifying experts, as well as both Democrat and Republican Congressmen, concluded that the sole cause was rampant sexism in higher education.

So what’s to be done with all these male chauvinist professors and university administrators?

One popular approach is to push for stronger enforcement of Title IX against university science departments. Title IX requires gender equity in education, though its main use has been to promote “equality” in school sports programs.

Sommers points out, however, that science and sports are different. Title IX has been used to encourage women to play sports in numbers equal to men, but they play on different teams, with generally lower performance expectations. No one suggests separate math classes, with lower standards, for girls.

Understanding that the Title IX tool may be insufficient, many feminists are pressing for major surgery to eliminate the supposed sexism in science. One is Virginia Valian, a psychologist and feminist leader. Sommers writes:

Valian is intent on radically transforming society to achieve her egalitarian ideals. She also wants to alter the behavior of successful scientists. Their obsessive work habits, single-minded dedication, and ‘intense desire for achievement,’ not only marginalize women, but also may compromise good science. She writes, ‘If we continue to emphasize and reward always being on the job, we will never find out whether leading a balanced life leads to equally good or better scientific work.’

Valian is convinced that we must pull out the weeds of sexism while they’re still little shoots. Sommers quotes her as follows:

This includes altering the way we raise our children. Consider the custom of encouraging girls to play with dolls. Such early socialization, she says, creates an association between being female and being nurturing. She concludes, ‘Egalitarian parents can bring up their children so that both boys and girls play with dolls and trucks…. From the standpoint of equality, nothing is more important.’

Now there’s a new idea.

Presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton takes a different approach to the problem of sexism in science, says Sommers. She proposes going for the jugular—money. Clinton wants to take gender “diversity” into consideration in the awarding of research grants.

Could it be all these folks are on the wrong track? Sommers suggests there are other possible explanations for gender disparities in science departments:

So why are there so few women in the high echelons of academic math and in the physical sciences? In a recent survey of faculty attitudes on social issues, sociologists Neil Gross of Harvard and Solon Simmons of George Mason University asked 1,417 professors what accounts for the relative scarcity of female professors in math, science, and engineering.

Just 1 percent of respondents attributed the scarcity to women’s lack of ability, 24 percent to sexist discrimination, and 74 percent to differences in what characteristically interests men and women.

Many experts who study male/female differences provide strong support for that 74 percent majority.

Sommers cites a host of studies on male/female differences in brain composition, including one from research on autism:

Baron-Cohen is one of the world’s leading experts on autism, a disorder that affects far more males than females. Autistic persons tend to be socially disconnected and unaware of the emotional states of others. But they often exhibit obsessive fixation on objects and machines. Baron-Cohen suggests that autism may be the far end of the male norm—the ‘extreme male brain,’ all systematizing and no empathizing. He believes that men are, ‘on average,’ wired to be better systematizers and women to be better empathizers.

It’s a daring claim—but he has data to back it up, presenting a wide range of correlations between the level of fetal testosterone and behaviors in both girls and boys from infancy into grade school.

There’s plenty of room here for further research. But before we overturn a scientific system that is the envy of the world, we need to seriously consider Sommers’ closing question:

American scientific excellence is a precious national resource. It is the foundation of our economy and of the nation’s health and safety. Norman Augustine, retired CEO of Lockheed Martin, and Burton Richter, Nobel laureate in physics, once pointed out that MIT alone—its faculty, alumni, and staff—started more than 5,000 companies in the past 50 years.

Will an academic science that is quota-driven, gender-balanced, cooperative rather than competitive, and less time-consuming produce anything like these results?

Here’s the Washington Post on Justice Clarence Thomas’ just-released autobiography, “My Grandfather’s Son”:

Thomas settles scores in an angry and vivid … memoir, scathingly condemning the media, the Democratic senators who opposed his nomination to the Supreme Court, and the “�mob’ of liberal elites and activist groups that he says desecrated his life.

The Post probably suspects that it’s among the “mob of liberal elites,” so the sarcastic bite here should come as no surprise.

Sixteen years ago, Thomas was at the center of a media circus when Anita Hill accused him of sexual misconduct at his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Since then, Thomas has withdrawn from the public stage. He appears reserved on the bench”the Justice who asks the fewest questions and engages in the least banter with lawyers who appear before the court.

But the public focus on Thomas hasn’t faded. He continues to personify our nation’s struggle with race and affirmative action. Liberals heap criticism on Thomas, painting him as a man who profited from affirmative action, only to turn against it. Conservatives find different lessons in his life and career.

Here, for example, is City Journal’s Michael Beran:

Liberals portray Justice Thomas as a beneficiary of affirmative action. He is in fact its victim. A man of character and intellect, Thomas rose from a poverty all but incomprehensible to most Americans today. He studied for the priesthood, went to college at Holy Cross and law school at Yale, and became a distinguished lawyer and jurist.

Yet the liberal mandarins have made these triumphs bitter by continually disparaging Thomas as a token appointee. His accomplishments are thus made to look dubious; the force of character and will that enabled him to rise from a shack in Pin Point, Georgia, to the United States Supreme Court, is overlooked.

Thomas understands”both personally and professionally”affirmative action’s sinister assumption: That standards must be lowered for black people, or they’ll fail to keep up with everyone else.

In his opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, one of the Supreme Court’s most important recent affirmative action decisions, Thomas made his view of affirmative action clear. He opened with a quote from civil rights giant Frederick Douglass:

In regard to the colored people, there is always more that is benevolent, I perceive, than just, manifested towards us. What I ask for the negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice.

The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us”� . I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall!.. And if the negro cannot stand on his own legs, Let him fall also.

All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! … [Y]our interference is doing him positive injury.

Here’s a law everyone should be willing to support:

The state shall not discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education or public contracting.

Voters in bastions of liberalism like California and Washington have passed laws like this — most recently in Michigan. Now civil rights activists have announced a “Super Tuesday of Equality” campaign to do the same in Colorado, Missouri, Arizona and Oklahoma in 2008.

Liberal interest groups will fight tooth and nail to prevent this, as will the legislators beholden to them. Both are loath to abandon the race and sex preferences written into current laws, university admissions policies and government contracting practices.

But in states where these measures have passed or are being proposed, supporters can go straight to the people in ballot initiatives.

In Colorado, civil rights initiative advocates are optimistic, says the Washington Times:

They pointed to the furor surrounding University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, who is under investigation for comments comparing victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks to Nazis. Mr. Churchill was awarded a full professorship despite weak academic credentials, and critics say the university gave him special treatment because he claimed Cherokee Indian ancestry, which is now in dispute. ‘We know people are with us on this in the aftermath of Ward Churchill,’ said Jessica Peck Corry of the Independence Institute based in Golden, Colo. ‘People are clearly saying that…it’s time to start treating women and minorities as the competent people we are.’

California — which passed the nation’s first civil rights initiative 11 years ago — is providing inspiration in the new campaign. Ward Connerly, the black former University of California regent who masterminded the initiative, points to its benefits:

[Connerly] and other initiative organizers say preference programs often harm the groups they intend to help…. Since preferences were banned in California’s public universities, Mr. Connerly said, the dropout rate for minority students has plummeted while the graduation rate has soared.

Racial preferences, says Connerly, resulted in mismatches between students and institutions of higher learning — placing them in a context where they were “doomed to fail.” “Once we eliminated preferences, retention went up,” he said.