#WTH does Larry Summers think about Harvard? DEI? Campus antisemitism?

And how to fix it.

Mar 18, 2024

University DEI offices not being 'inclusive' of Jewish students after Hamas attacks - The Lion

Part of the problem for conservatives — and your loyal podcast hosts are certainly conservatives — is that the left has become so associated with elites and elitism, antisemitism and racism, that there is a temptation to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We ask, listening to the garbage spewed by Ivy League administrators and professors and their students, whether our meritocracy is fundamentally broken. And the answer is no — there are elements that are worthy of saving. And there are underlying principles worthy of adherence.

Now, before you toss, metaphorically, this substack onto the heap, think about it: Should people who work hard and strive and compete succeed better than those who rely on set asides and entitlements? Sure. Should our nation be able to accept unpalatable views expressed peaceably? Of course. Do we believe in the power of moral and compelling leadership to steer not just our ship of state, but our institutions? You bet we do.

LISTEN

The problem with elite institutions like Harvard, per former President Larry Summers, is that on each of these and so many other standards, universities have fallen short. The right thing is to try to fix them, and in so doing, fix their students, their peer institutions, and our future generations.

Left wing antisemitism on campuses, like left wing Marxist absolutism, is not a genetic feature of students or administrators. It is a product of bad hiring, bad education, and bad standards. It feeds a DEI mentality that is corrosive to the very idea of what America is, and foments an intellectual laziness that is eating away at our political and economic systems. When antisemitism is genuine Jew hatred, it must be met with discipline and consequence. When it is simply a bad idea pasted to a poster — where is Palestine, anyway? — it falls within our native American right to be dumb.

How do we fix it the problems that are worse than just dumb? As Larry rightly says, we punish outrages, we restore meritocracy, we revitalize competition, we abjure litmus tests — including our own, if need be — and, from my perspective, we emphasize the professorships of practice. What does that mean?

So, one of the most fascinating parts of an overall fascinating conversation was Larry’s suggestion that:

If you believe in capitalism, you have many choices in life. You can work for a company, you can work for a university. There are many places you can work. And therefore, even if universities don't have any biases at all, there's a tendency for the people who end up in universities to be substantially more anti-capitalism than the general population. And once they're there, people in all walks of life have a tendency to choose people like them. But to assume that this is all due to discrimination and bad motives is I think a mistake rather than to recognize the natural selection mechanism.

How do you subvert the natural selection of anticapitalists and anti-meritocrats in the university? You choose more people who have had real lives outside academia, and can share real experiences with students. You have leaders of industry, bankers, government staff, people with “lived” histories — to use the modern parlance — rather than people who merely interpret history. You rip academics and their students from the ivory tower and force them to confront the world.

But most of all, you reject the idea that honest debate is unacceptable, that students must be protected from the “harm” of reality, and that there are genetic, racial, or ethnic prerequisites for special treatment in higher ed. And that Jews must be singled out for abuse.

All that is a start. Listen to the pod, we think you’ll really like it.

HIGHLIGHTS

How do you assess the last few months for Harvard?

LS: It's been a very difficult period for Harvard. If you look at applications, they're down by 17%, which is kind of unprecedented relative to the normal fluctuations. If you look at fundraising, it appears to be very substantially down. Yes, big gifts, but just the fraction of alumni who want to give $100 or $500 has gone way down because people are disillusioned. In fact, people were raising questions about whether they wanted to continue managing Harvard's money — endowment managers, because of concerns about the signal the university had sent.

I think there is a very serious reputational problem that's emerged for Harvard, and that comes out of a particular incident where 35 student groups basically blamed Israel for the Hamas attacks and inexplicably the university leadership didn't quickly condemn that act and disassociate Harvard from those 35 student groups.

But I think this is the tip of an iceberg of problem that goes way beyond Harvard and many ways goes beyond the antisemitism issue. It seems to me that universities have to have a consistent standard on prejudice and a consistent standard on free speech. And what's become completely clear is that types of expression and conduct that are forcefully condemned that lead to people's ostracism, where you're talking about racism, or you're talking about misogyny, or you're talking about homophobia, are seen as acceptable debate and discourse when you're talking about antisemitism.

Talk about what we are seeing on campus?

LS: With respect to antisemitism, I have been surprised, but not shocked, and very disillusioned by the upsurge of what I would call left-wing antisemitism which I think is a different phenomenon than much traditional antisemitism \, but hardly a new phenomenon. Look at Jeremy Corbyn. Look at history of Stalin's Russia. There has always been a stream of virulent anti-Judaism in left-wing ideas. And as Israel has come to seem an example of an imperialist and colonialist state to some, there has been a tendency to demonize Israel in ways that I think are very, very problematic.

I very much understand that there's a distinction between opposing Israeli policy and being antisemitic. That there's even a distinction between being anti-Zionist and being antisemitic. But when so many people are so elaborately concerned with what they see as Israeli injustice towards Palestinians, and are so ostentatiously unconcerned with Palestinian suffering at the hands of other Arab states, when they're so unconcerned about suffering of other minority groups in Africa, in Asia, in other continents. And so much of the focus is on only the Jewish state that I think one does have to see, as I said many years ago, that a lot of what thoughtful and reasonable people are advocating is antisemitic in what its effect would be, if not perhaps in their intent.

And I think the leaders of great universities have fallen way short of being willing to make that point in a clear way. And I think the reason is a lack of courage and a lack of willingness to accept controversy with progressive elements or so-called progressive elements within their faculty.

Why was it so hard for university presidents to condemn antisemitism?

LS: I don't think it should have been so hard. I think that more effective communication would not have been difficult. And it's certainly not my intention to make excuses for what I think was one of the least successful instances of institutional representation in history. When you turn your university into a Saturday Night Live skit, that is a consequential leadership failure.

That having been said, I would say some other things. Testimony before a congressional committee is a kind of performance art.

When the Congress people are performing and in full performance mode. And the people who testified unsuccessfully hadn't had experience with that kind of performance art. And that's important to recognize in judging them. The issues are difficult. It is the Supreme Court of the United States that concluded that it was okay, indeed obligatory, to allow the Nazis to march in support of Nazism through Skokie, Illinois — a town distinguished by the number of Holocaust survivors who lived within it at a time when the residents weren't the descendants of Holocaust survivors, they were Holocaust survivors. And that's what our Supreme Court mandated.

Free speech does have its pull. The challenge is not so much to be in a competition as to who can strongly censor a speech. It's to recognize, and this has been what I've always said about this, that academic freedom does not include freedom from criticism. That an ability to call out in sharp, vivid, and clear terms that which is morally wrong so people don't want to engage in it, so others learn not to follow those who are speaking in outrageous ways. That is an important part of the task of leadership. If we're debating what should be punished and what shouldn't be punished, and the nuances of the First Amendment, we've already lost, what we need to do is just set some clear moral tone on right and wrong. If we did that, I think we would be in a much better place on our college campuses.

This has been building for a long time. The Harvard student newspaper several years ago endorsed the idea of boycott divest sanction (BDS) Israel. The then administration of the university said that it had various doctrines of not believing in boycotting and divesting in general, but it did not treat the singling out of Israel as any kind of moral problem and wasn't willing to. Well, that's the kind of tolerance that allows this to grow.

I think that I was very much influenced many, many years ago by an old conservative idea, the broken windows theory of criminology and how that creates the conditions for social decay and rising criminality. I think with respect to the excesses in the name of progressive causes, we've had a broken windows theory operative, where nothing is called out and therefore the excesses increase and the culture changes. We've now gotten to a moment where how far off we've gotten has been made very salient in a very public way with far-reaching consequences for these institutions.

And a big percentage of the professoriat is actually encouraging this behavior, right?

LS: There's a difference between being brilliant and being smart or wise. Professors are chosen for being brilliant in their niches of inquiry. That does not necessarily make them smart or wise about the formation of the character of young people or about the effective operation of institutions. There has been an excessive abdication by trustees and by university leaders to faculty tastes and to the kinds of values and tastes that lead people to decide to be faculty members. I don't think the answer lies in political litmus tests on who can teach Shakespeare, or who can teach quantum theory, or even who can teach econometrics. I think the answer lies in the faculty focusing on where they have expertise and the broader governance coming in other kinds of places.

If university leaders were less subservient to their faculty, I think it would be very helpful. Let me take an example. One of the challenges that... I sympathize with university leaders, is it is easy for us to sit here and say on some podcast, that if students break into a classroom and use a megaphone and disrupt it for a minute, their names will be taken and they will then be subject to discipline. Unfortunately, discipline is, by design though not appropriate design, the prerogative of the faculty. The faculty is highly prone to engage in a kind of academic equivalent of juror nullification on discipline issues with respect to progressive people pursuing progressive causes.

I was embarrassed for Harvard. There was, at least according to the press reports, there were a group of students who occupied one of our central administration buildings all night despite having been asked to leave repeatedly. I understand why nobody sent the police in with the possibility of a violent and explosive episode. I understand that decision and I might well have made the same decision if it had been my decision to make. What I cannot understand is how anyone with the title of dean was permitted to pass burritos in through the window so that the students in that administration building could feel well-fed during their all-night occupation without being condemned, criticized, or fired by their superiors. That was something I could not understand.

So there is a massive double-standard for hiring and firing in academia, depending on your politics?

LS: I think there is somewhat less actual firing in actual application of discipline for outrageous, conservative, outrageous statements in a right-wing direction then is often supposed. What happens is that it is condemned and deterred in broader cultural ways, and that is the real failure. I think we need to be very careful, and I think some of my friends on the conservative side do need to remember that their forebears were actively taking the position as alumni and trustees of universities in the 1950s, that the Samuelson textbook should be banned because it taught Keynesian economics — [and that] Keynesian economics was a tool of communism. That was a position that was being taken by conservatives, who some regard as heroic today. William F. Buckley came very close to positions of that kind. So, I think the better positions are not to get excited about how more people need to get fired about more things, but instead need to be about three other ideas. That nobody can speak for the university, you can only speak for yourself. That order has to be maintained and you can't disrupt the rights of others to speak. And that all perspectives need to be represented and that there's an obligation to hear people with many different points of view.

Harvard got the lowest freedom of speech score from FIRE this year. Accurate?

LS: I've looked very hard at that ranking of Harvard as last. I am not proud of where Harvard is on free speech, but because things at Harvard get publicized and because it's dramatic to make Harvard last, that is not a fair representation of what's going on.

DEI statements I cannot defend as reasonable or appropriate. I do think, and that's how I began this discussion, that there is a double standard around different forms of prejudice. But I would urge us to be a little bit careful in where we are proposing to start condemning and firing people and not allowing people to march and to say things. I think one needs to be very freedom respecting, at the same time, one has to be very culture forming. And the large problems have been that there has been no effort to establish a climate in which antisemitism is unacceptable. And that has been the real failure of leadership. Not a failure of punishing people for speaking or punishing people for participating in demonstrations. And that is the balance that has to be struck with very considerable care.

This is not your grandmother’s Democratic party…

LS: I think being active, being involved counts and a lot of very able people with the kind of luxury beliefs, philosophy that you describe have energized themselves very substantially and very fully. And as the institutions have opened themselves up and been less closed and been not any longer able to be dominated by party bosses, that desirable reform has made them more susceptible to being captured by energized elites with luxury beliefs, particularly when they're able to form coalitions with members of traditionally disadvantaged groups.

And I think it is the great dilemma of the current Democratic Party… And this is the example I always use, there's a famous picture we've all seen of three guys sitting on a girder over New York City belted to the girder eating their lunch. And that picture was the essence of the Roosevelt Democrat voters. And today's reality is the two out of three of those people are no longer Democrats.

And that is the central challenge, it seems to me, for a traditional conception of the Democratic Party. The old Democratic Party, let's face it, the Roosevelt Democratic Party was racism tolerant. A highly important part of its coalition was the South. The Social Security reform legislation, historic though it was, was crafted in ways that had important racist elements.

Higher education today is polarizing us further. How do we fix that?

LS: I'm an economist, not a sociologist, so I don't know the answer completely, but I would hope that we would see some rejuvenation of the notion of patriotism, which is a concept that has largely faded away in discussions in many parts of our country. One of the things that disturbed me most during my time as president of Harvard was the realization that I was the first Ivy League president in 30 years to attend an ROTC commissioning ceremony, which reflected the degree of estrangement between universities and the people who risk their lives to protect us. And I think our leading institutions need to recognize that as leading institutions, they are citizens of our country, institutional citizens of our country. And that citizenship comes with responsibilities as well as with privileges. And I think with the challenges that we face right now, the responsibilities to contribute to our national security at a time when our country's under more threat than it has been in a long time is a very real one. And if there is any silver lining in any of this, it might be that the existence of a common threat will cause Americans to be bound more tightly together because of that common threat than they had been previously.

What is the academy’s responsibility in fixing this problem?

LS: It is a failure. It is a failure of the academy. I can't defend what has come of very large parts of history profession. I can defend very little of what goes on in the nation's education schools where indoctrination about injustice seems a much larger theme than efficacious ways to teach people to read and one has to hope that leaders will emerge. I think there is a tendency for intellectuals to want to say something, things that are new rather than echo things that are old.

And as some of these very problematic ideas have increasingly become conventional wisdom, I wonder if that won't set the stage for them to be challenged because that's always what happens.

How do we restore intellectual diversity to higher education?

LS: These are very hard problems. Let's start with easy things. If we pursue excellence and we are open to excellence no matter what its background, that's probably the most important thing we can do for both diversity and for excellence. And widening the circle of opportunity for everyone. Eliminating any kind of discrimination based on the color of your skin, your beliefs, the income of your parents, the place where you grew up, any of it. That's the most powerful and important thing we can do to pursue opportunity, to pursue excellence and to pursue diversity. And that is where all the emphasis should be.

Second, we should get rid of litmus tests, litmus test statements, litmus test statements for people who want to be professors where they're asked to express their fealty or demonstrate their past loyalty to pursuing increased representation of members of certain groups. I don't think that has any place in a liberal institution, no place because you shouldn't have loyalty oaths and that which you're asking loyalty to is probably not in its totality likely to be very constructive. I think the problem of having a more ideologically balanced faculty is a complicated one. I think people need to recognize this. If you believe in capitalism, you have many choices in life. You can work for a company, you can work for a university. There are many places you can work.

And therefore, even if universities don't have any biases at all, there's a tendency for the people who end up in universities to be substantially more anti-capitalism than the general population. And once they're there, people in all walks of life have a tendency to choose people like them. But to assume that this is all due to discrimination and bad motives is I think a mistake rather than to recognize the natural selection mechanism.

And I guess I would say to my conservative friends that I share your aversion to a homophily of belief within universities and all of that. But I think you need to be very careful about saying things that will sound like you’re advocating the kind of affirmative action programs for conservatives who don't quite make the cut that you condemn when they're advocated for groups that are chosen or identified in other ways. And so I think if we can all circle back to the idea of as wide a circle as possible so as to maximize opportunity because that's what creates the most excellence and we can keep it at that simple proposition, I think that offers the best prospect going forward.

Full transcript here.