On Monday’s broadcast of CNN’s “AC360,” Harvard Professor and President Emeritus and former Harvard President Larry Summers stated that the demonstrations on campus aren’t like the anti-apartheid protests and we wouldn’t need to talk about calling the police if schools hadn’t allowed things to get out of hand in the first place and “I wish they had made the decision not to allow these students to enter in the first place. I wish that they had rapidly threatened escalating discipline and suspensions, the inability to graduate, the inability to get credit for the semester. I wish they had been much stronger in responding to earlier provocations, of which there have been many, since October 7.”
Summers said, “These are very sad pictures. Students have a right to protest. They have a right to express themselves. They don’t have a right to disrupt. And it’s very clear that there’s substantial disruption on many campuses, and administrations have agonizingly difficult choices to make. I wish they had made the decision not to allow these students to enter in the first place. I wish that they had rapidly threatened escalating discipline and suspensions, the inability to graduate, the inability to get credit for the semester. I wish they had been much stronger in responding to earlier provocations, of which there have been many, since October 7. And I think if it had been managed right, we wouldn’t be discussing police presences in the way that we are. … I think there’s a lot you can do short of calling in the police, but it has to be completely clear that you cannot disrupt with impunity. I also think that there’s no reason why those who are not students who are disrupting campus activities should not be promptly arrested and charged with trespassing.”
He added, “So, this is not about which side you are or how you think about anti-Zionism versus antisemitism. This is about a basic concept of academic freedom, which involves respect for order, and on too many campuses, those values were not upheld with sufficient vigor over the last six months, and rather predictably, we’re seeing consequences now.”
Host Anderson Cooper then asked, “[W]hen I was at school, in 1985 to 89, there were anti-apartheid protests on campus, but it wasn’t turning students against one another and students feeling threatened by other protesters who were screaming at them. Have you ever faced something like this?”
Summers responded, “I didn’t — there were not protests of this kind when I was at Harvard, I think largely that was a function of the circumstance and what the particular moment was. It may also have had to do with the fact that there was a sense that there would be a strong and vigorous response. I agree with you that the thing that’s most like this that I can remember is the events that took place during the Vietnam War period, where there were threats, epithets hurled at people who were in the military or who supported the Vietnam War and where there were active attempts to demonize people who were members of the community, and you are seeing that in the acts that are taking place towards Jewish and Zionist students, and that makes this a particularly repugnant form of speech in a way that was not the case in the apartheid protests or the living wage protests.”
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