Intelligent men have long sensed that the wise course in the face of female fury is to hide until it passes. The tendency to duck and cover isn’t a form of respect. It’s a form of condescension: Hold your breath long enough and they’ll calm down, or move on to another target. In this sense, the women outraged over Lawrence Summers’s remarks about women in science are correct to be upset. But they are upset for the wrong reasons. Mr. Summers is about the only man in the discussion who has attempted to treat them with respect, by speaking to them as equals, who, he presumed, cared as much as he did about what was true and what was not.

Anyone with an interest in this surprisingly long-running saga – and I can understand why many might have moved on – should be sure to read the full transcript of Mr. Summers’s January 14 remarks (see www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html).

They are interesting, and not just because they are now famously controversial. They are thoughtful, and, more importantly, designed to stimulate thought. One thing that seems to separate Mr. Summers, who has led Harvard University since 2001, from just about every other university president in the land, is that he has the nerve to create discussion. To be interesting.

The job of running a big prestigious university is a shadow of its former self, and you have to wonder a bit about anyone who would want to do it these days. At the top of the job’s requirements is the ability to move through the world, from dawn to dusk, without making too strong an impression on it – without stirring up any kind of passion at all.

You spend so much time sucking up to people for money, pretending to respect employees because you can’t fire them, and avoiding the real, and thus controversial, issues of the greater society, that you must go to sleep at night wondering why you took the job in the first place. Any impulse you might have had toward intellectual leadership – to grapple seriously with big questions, to fight the fights worth fighting – you learn to quell.

But Mr. Summers is different. He can afford to cause a bit of trouble – in part because he is in full possession of a first-rate mind, in part because Harvard has $23 billion in the bank, in part because he has a track record of accomplishment that includes a stint as U.S. Treasury secretary. And in his speech to the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Conference on Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce, he makes an interesting suggestion.

Not, as the more hysterical critics want you to believe, that he thinks women are inferior to men. Not that he is convinced women are generally less capable in science and math. What he says – and his meaning could not be clearer – is that HE DOES NOT KNOW why women are underrepresented in science. But, he suspects, science itself is trying to tell us something about the problem.

As he put it, “It does appear that on many, many different human attributes – height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability – there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means – which can be debated – there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and female population.”

The ideas floated by Mr. Summers might be proved right, or might be proved wrong. What they weren’t was intellectually dishonest, or lazy. The president of a great university was examining a social problem seriously, as a man who intended to solve it. His argument is nuanced but the spirit in which he makes it is clear: He is hoping to increase the number of women on science faculties.

To do that, Mr. Summers argues that you must understand the reason for their relative absence, which may not be simply, as a lot of people want badly to believe, a matter of pure sex discrimination.

And yet, a full six weeks later, the collective response from the academy is still captured by Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who walked out in the middle of Mr. Summers’s speech. She couldn’t stay and listen, she told the Boston Globe, because if she had, “I would’ve either blacked out or thrown up.”

Faced with a question that science might address – indeed, is busy trying to address – this scientist preferred to respond with pure emotion. She took a scientific hypothesis and turned it into a political weapon. If we lived in a braver world, one in which people were willing to stand up to other self-dramatizing people who long to see themselves as “victims,” Ms. Hopkins would have become, briefly, a figure of fun, and then been forgotten.

Instead, a lot of people have rallied to her side and done what they needed to make sure she did not suffer another fainting spell. The Harvard faculty has come close to generating a vote of no confidence in Mr. Summers. The presidents of Stanford, Princeton, and MIT have written a joint letter chastising him (thus keeping the peace with their own faculties). The air is thick with cowardice.

All sorts of people who might have stood up and defended Mr. Summers have remained silent. At this point, no one cares any longer whether the questions raised by the president of Harvard were interesting or dull, worth investigating or discarding. All that matters now is that Mr. Summers is “controversial.”

A number of people say they worry about the effects of his remarks on girls who might hope one day to become scientists. Never mind that the number of girls who will know of Mr. Summers’s remarks is now multiplied a thousand times by the noise created by the professors who wish they wouldn’t hear them. Any girl thinking of making a career in academe who reads Mr. Summers’s speech would, I hope, be encouraged that there is still one university president with the guts of a leader. She might even be stimulated to address his questions, scientifically.

Mr. Lewis is a columnist for Bloomberg News.