On Friday’s broadcast of Bloomberg’s “Wall Street Week,” Harvard Professor and President Emeritus and former Harvard President Larry Summers said that America’s enemies must “be taking great encouragement from the spectacle that is being made by our young future elites on so many of our leading college campuses, and even more by the craven responses that are typifying university leaderships.”
Summers stated, “This is very depressing and worrisome to me. As I’ve said on your show before, David, I think the United States is in the most dangerous geopolitical moment we’ve been in probably two generations, given what’s happening in China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and so forth. And it seems to me that anybody sitting in one of those countries has to be taking great encouragement from the spectacle that is being made by our young future elites on so many of our leading college campuses, and even more by the craven responses that are typifying university leaderships.”
He added, “I think this is a failure of a fundamental part of education, the imbuing people with an ability to contemplate serious moral issues in serious ways. There is idealism among some of those protesting, though some of them are being driven by outside agitation and outside funding. And I respect the idealism of those who live by a theory of civil disobedience and are prepared, for their cause, to accept punishment. But when I see spectacles like the law review of Columbia University demanding that exams be canceled or grading be stopped this year because of what happened on that campus, I think that bespeaks a kind of decadence that causes me to be very worried about the future of our universities and about the future, therefore, of our country. I wish we could find ways of getting things back on track.”
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