Philip Larkin might have had a thing or two to say about the Tiger Mother. The English poet had a famously mordant view of parenting and the long-term psychological impact on its victims:

They f— you up your mum and dad

They do not mean to but they do

Larry Summers and Amy Chua exchanged views on parenting styles in Davos this week. Associated Press

We can only guess what he would have made of the phenomenon that is Amy Chua, the Yale law professor who was once merely a trenchant commentator on globalization but is now, thanks to a sensational new book, the world's most admired, feared, loved and loathed mother. Larkin's pop psychology would surely have made hay with the story of how Ms. Chua once forced her daughter to go without food and drink until she had learned how to play a tune on the piano.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra just for you

Sadly, Prof. Larkin, from whose own turbulent life—if he's right—we must infer quite a bit about his parents, is no longer with us. So instead this week it fell to another academic to critique the Chinese way of parenting.

In one of the most entertaining of the sessions at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week, the organizers pitted Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary, Harvard president and recently departed Obama administration chief economic adviser, against Prof. Chua. Harvard vs. Yale, West vs. East, Economist vs. Lawyer, Permissive Postmodern Parent vs. Dictatorial Disciplinarian of Daughters.

Of course it wasn't quite like that.

Earlier Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior

Prof. Summers, for a start, is evidently no pushover parent himself. At the meeting, organized by the Global Agenda Councils, he instantly acknowledged that he bears no resemblance to the indulgent, indolent Western stereotype Ms. Chua excoriates in her book "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," first excerpted in The Wall Street Journal earlier this month.

In fact, he noted, in Larkinesque language, that his own reputation—at home as much as in his professional life—was as something of a "hard-ass."

His audience, a select group of Davos participants, business leaders, policymakers, journalists and professors themselves, probably needed no reminding of his tumultuous stint as Harvard president, which ended after multiple clashes with the faculty.

Amy Chua Hollandse-Hoogte/Redux Pictures

But he recalled anyway some of his more turbulent exchanges there, like the time he once told puzzled faculty members: "I think you have to decide whether achievement is the route to self-esteem or whether self-esteem is the route to achievement. I think you guys think self-esteem is the route to achievement, and I think you're wrong."

And yet even the stern intendant of traditional academic values couldn't quite bring himself to endorse the hard-ass Asian mothering style. Surprisingly for an academic who has won almost all the glittering prizes, he challenged the idea—cherished by Ms. Chua and her admirers—that academic success as a route to a rewarding career should be the sum of a child's ambitions.

"Which two freshmen at Harvard have arguably been most transformative of the world in the last 25 years?" he asked. "You can make a reasonable case for Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, neither of whom graduated." If they had been the product of a Tiger Mom upbringing, he added, their mothers would probably have been none too pleased with their performance.

The A, B and C alums at Harvard in fact could be broadly characterized thus, he said: The A students became academics, B students spent their time trying to get their children into the university as legacies, and the C students—the ones who had made the money—sat on the fund-raising committee.

And while Ms. Chua and Mr. Summers agree that the immigrant's special aspirations apply not just to Chinese mothers—surely many Eastern Europeans, Africans or Latin Americans recognize their own families' histories in Ms Chua's narrative of extreme parenting—Mr. Summers argued that these aspirations cannot explain all.

That's a good point. Some ethnic immigrant groups clearly perform better in certain academic and professional fields than others—why, for example, should more than 50% of Berkeley's computer-science students be Asian-born?

And differences in the immigrant experience around the world also suggest that the heavily beaten path to academic and professional success is not a universally shared goal. Europe, for example, is haunted by immigrant groups that are not socially and economically integrated—though that probably has more to do with the fundamental economic difference between the U.S. and Europe. Immigrants to European states with a large social welfare net are likely to have somewhat different motivations from those who venture to an enterprise economy such as America's.

In any case, Mr. Summers mused, perhaps we ought to agree that happiness is truly the greatest virtue, and unraveling the mysteries of the origins of happiness is really the key to the most successful parenting. "People on average live a quarter of their lives as children. That's a lot," Mr. Summers said. "It's important that they be as happy as possible during those 18 years. That counts too."

If the audience had been expecting to be terrorized by the daunting Ms. Chua into immediately performing a quick sonata, translating the dinner menu into perfect Mandarin or reciting pi to 25 decimal places, they would have been pleasantly surprised. In person, as in her book, she is more identifiably maternal than tigerish.

She recounted how the book actually documents a more nuanced parenting style. Her daughter's reaction to an accumulation of some of her more extreme measures led her to a change of heart. The book, in fact, is self-mocking in part, and though she winds up extolling the virtues of tough love, she actually makes a case for a kind of synthesis of East and West—in parenting as in much else.

All of which sounds rather disappointing. What started out as a bracing cold shower of tough traditionalism risks ending in a soft warm bubble bath of multiculturalism, where everyone simply gets along swimmingly. That said, the Chua manifesto, even in slightly diluted form, will continue to resonate. It is already a publishing phenomenon.

In Davos this week, Ms. Chua shuttled busily from one klieg-lit event to another, as much in media demand as any penurious head of state or gauzy movie star. A separate publishing phenomenon might explore the reasons her thesis has chimed so loudly with Americans. My own theory is simple. The engaging Ms. Chua has captured in perfect synthesis the two things middle-age Americans now fear most—China, and their own children.

Write to Gerard Baker at Gerard.Baker@wsj.com