While discussing the broader issues in higher education on Friday’s broadcast of Bloomberg’s “Wall Street Week,” Harvard Professor and President Emeritus and former Harvard President Larry Summers stated that “universities have, in many cases, including at Harvard, been failed by their trustees.”
Summers said, “I think this is a time of testing for universities certainly unlike any other, certainly since the Vietnam War period and perhaps even going beyond that. Some of our leading universities are under investigation, both from Republicans in the House of Representatives and from the Education Department of the Biden administration. You’re seeing a degree of divisiveness on campus that I haven’t seen since I first got to the Harvard campus in 1975. So, I think there’s going to be a very profound challenge of finding a vital center. Universities must stand up to some of the vitriolic forces on the populist right that seem to be in favor of everything up to book burning…[a]t the same time, I don’t think there’s any question that they have been threatened from within by stifling orthodoxies that have led to the cancellation of speakers, that have led to people being discomforted by discussing issues like crime, like education, except in particular prescribed ways. And it’s going to be a challenge of university leaders to find a way between those twin abhorrent poles.”
He continued, “I have to say that this goes way beyond any individual. I think universities have, in many cases, including at Harvard, been failed by their trustees. At Harvard, we call the group the corporation. And in many ways, it is their job, above all, to maintain a healthy interface between the university and the broader society.”
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