WTH is Going On at Harvard? Larry Summers Explains
What the Hell Is Going On
AEI Podcasts
4.4 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 14 March 2024
⏱️ 59 minutes
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Summary
Following the terrorist attacks of October 7th, Harvard University was among several elite bastions of higher education to show its true colors – moral relativism, raw antisemitism on campus, and poor leadership. Harvard, like other elite institutions, has and will continue to suffer reputational damage for its response. And indeed, the rot of higher ed is deep. It is not that a liberal bias has metastasized into illiberalism, but rather that illiberalism has been layered on top of a creeping and extreme form of leftism. What is going on in our country’s top universities? Who is to blame? How do we solve it?
Lawrence H. Summers was Chief Economist of the World Bank (1991-93), US Secretary of the Treasury (1999-2001), Director of the US National Economic Council (2009-10), and President of Harvard University (2001-06).
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute. |
| 0:03.1 | If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. Thanks for listening. Here's our show. What the hell's going on? What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? I don't know what the hell he's talking about. You don't have to know what the hell is on it. What hell's the matter with these guys? We don't know what's going on. Hotels gone on. |
| 0:01.0 | Who in God's name knows what it's all about. |
| 0:23.6 | Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka. |
| 0:30.6 | And I'm Mark Tieson. |
| 0:31.6 | Welcome to our podcast. |
| 0:33.6 | What the hell is going on? |
| 0:35.6 | Mark, what the hell is going on? What the hell is going on is |
| 0:40.0 | Harvard University has had what many have been calling its bud light moment when it has suffered |
| 0:46.2 | a reputational damage that is lasting and possibly unrecoverable. And we have with us the former president of Harvard University to talk to us |
| 0:57.6 | about this. Larry Summers is somebody who I have enormous respect for because he is a loyal Democrat. |
| 1:04.2 | He's a man of the left. Probably he'd say the center left. But he's willing to criticize his own side. And he calls balls and strikes like he sees them. And he's not a team player in the worst sense of that word when the team is bad or doing the bad things. He's willing to call them out. I kind of model him a little bit, try to model him in my life. I'm a loyal conservative. I'm a man of the right. But I'm willing to call out people on my side when they do the wrong thing. I think you're the same way. And I think that's how we should all be, because that's the only way you can have decent conversations about problems in the world. And Larry Summers is willing to do that. And so he's going to talk to us about where he thinks we go a little too far in our criticism of Harvard, |
| 1:45.2 | where he thinks the criticism is justified, and the broader problems of the academy, it's a really |
| 1:50.9 | fascinating conversation. Yeah, it certainly is. I love the way you describe him, because I think |
| 1:55.5 | that's exactly right. What we are missing in this country is civil discourse about the problems that affect us all. |
| 2:04.5 | You know, whether you have kids in school or you're in your office, you're worried about |
| 2:09.5 | wokeness or you're worried about excesses on the right. There's a way to talk about these kinds |
| 2:15.0 | of things and you're exactly right. It's not just civil discourse. It's |
| 2:18.0 | also honest discourse and self-critical discourse because, you know, we can, we can civilly, you know, |
| 2:23.3 | disagree, which is we need more of. But we also need each side of the political spectrum to |
| 2:29.6 | police their own sides, their own movements, right? We have to criticize conservatives when conservatives |
| 2:35.7 | when conservatives say stupid things and do stupid things. And we need more people on the left who are |
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