HEATHER MAC DONALD: Don’t Even Think About Being Evil – Corporate America has managed to make higher education look like an open marketplace of ideas.

Mr. Damore’s fate was foreshadowed by the sacking of Harvard president Larry Summers in 2006. At a conference the previous year, Mr. Summers had hypothesized that the unequal distribution of the highest-level mathematical abilities may contribute to the sex disparity of science faculties. Numerous studies have confirmed that men predominate at the farthest reaches of math skills (high and low).

Mr. Summers’s carefully qualified speculation infamously provoked MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins to flee the room and tell reporters she “would’ve either blacked out or thrown up” had she stayed. Mr. Summers issued a groveling retraction and ponied up a cool $50 million for more gender-diversity initiatives, but his tenure as president was doomed.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai employed the same bathetic language of injury in his response to Mr. Damore. “The memo has clearly impacted our co-workers, some of whom are hurting and feel judged based on their gender,” he asserted in a memo of his own. Yonatan Zunger, a recently departed Google senior engineer, claimed in an online essay that the speculations of Mr. Damore, a junior employee, have “caused significant harm to people across this company, and to the company’s entire ability to function.” He added that “not all conversations about ideas even have basic legitimacy” (emphasis his).

This is what happens when a multibillion-dollar corporation is run and largely staffed by crybullies.

Plus: “When a gigantic corporation that controls our data and knows us intimately takes a controversial political stance, it ought to make us worry,” the wise man once wrote.