Lawrence Summers, the former Harvard University president and former U.S. treasury secretary, stated on Wednesday that U.S. President Donald Trump is being tougher on the Ivy League school in Cambridge, Mass., than he is on Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“I could have never conceived that the U.S. president would be far more aggressive against a great university than he would be against a Russian dictator engaged in invading a U.S. ally,” Summers stated. “Why is it smart to starve cancer research, students on financial aid, innovation in public education and brilliant young people whose dream was to come to America while holding out the prospect of business deals to Vladimir Putin? I cannot imagine.”
Summers allowed that one must marvel at the “folly of intellectuals” in much of what happens at Harvard, including antisemitism.
It is “unconscionable,” he wrote, that the dean of the Harvard Divinity School treated “the Holocaust and the nakba in parallel in her major address” and stood by “a commencement marshal convicted of harassing an Israeli student.”
“There are issues the government is right to look at. Academic freedom does not mean universities are unconstrained by the Civil Rights Act, the Constitution and much more,” he wrote. “But totalizing efforts at destruction are never legal in America, and doing vast damage beyond their object is a reason the founding fathers separated powers.”
“The judiciary has to stop the overreach and support the reasonable enforcement of law with regard to Harvard and many other places,” he stated.
