Frank BruniRoss Douthat and Lawrence H. Summers, ‘Are We Past Peak Harvard?’: 3 Writers Mull Higher Education’s Woes, NYTimes, June 22, 2025. About half-way in:
Summers: Frank, I am less optimistic than you about self-repair. Of the good changes — enhanced discipline of disrupters, scale backs of absurd identity politics, curtailment of academic centers engaged in propaganda and so forth — a disproportionate share of what has happened since Oct. 7, 2023, has happened in the last few months. I’ve never had any problem with students, even when I’ve been supercritical of ideas like divesting from fossil fuels or chanting “from the river to the sea.” 98 percent of students are curious and open minded. The problem is much more with faculty in humanities and the less quantitative social sciences and with the noncommercial professions like public health, divinity and education.
Still, institutions don’t become the oldest continuous entities in a society — Harvard at around almost 400 years — without the ability to adapt. Yes, the moves are way too slow. I tried to accelerate the process as Harvard president, and the antibodies were enormous. But if trustees do their job, this can be fixed. I am on the left’s 40-yard line in America and the right’s 10 at Harvard. It should not be that way.
Douthat: Exactly. Larry’s point about where he stands ideologically at Harvard — for readers who aren’t football fans, as the far-rightward flank of the university even though he’s himself a centrist Democrat — gets at the reasonable demand that American conservatism can make, which is that if you have a set of elite universities that are deeply entangled with the American government, with a profound and ancient relationship with the American people, they should make an effort to contain within themselves the actual diversity of ideas and worldviews that define America today. Not in the sense that 50 percent of every department needs to be Republican, but in the sense that actual conservatism — not just a mild libertarianism in the economics departments — should not be represented by a tiny handful of faculty members at a sprawling and powerful school.
Bruni: Ross, it’s clear that Trump and his allies actually don’t want sweeping protections for free speech. They correctly called out intolerance on the left but are now replacing it with intolerance from the right. When you’re essentially banning any mention of D.E.I., detaining students for political viewpoints they’ve articulated, putting institutions on notice that you’ll punish them for any deviation from just-two-genders orthodoxy, well, Trump is swapping one cancel culture for another. No?
Douthat: It’s completely fair to say that the Trumpist critique of elite universities isn’t actually sure what it wants. Does it want sweeping protections for free speech — or does it want universities to crack down harder on speech that seems to justify terrorism and anti-Semitism? Does it want a recommitment to academic freedom — or does it want universities to micromanage their departments to ensure ideological balance? And all of this reflects the fact that the Trumpist coalition is itself diverse and internally contradictory. [...]
Summers: I cannot follow the logic of the Trump attacks. But there is hypocrisy on both sides. When the subject is underrepresented groups, there is a set of arguments about the importance of merit, the danger of discrimination and so forth that are invoked by the right and in just the same form by the left when the idea is to achieve more ideological balance. My view is that soft tilts are warranted in both cases, but when you start mandating and using quotas and judging outcomes by litmus tests it’s problematic always.
There is certainly stuff happening at state schools, where they are mandating curricula or forcing books out of libraries that is stifling free speech. And there is some chilling of speech by those on temporary visas. That is terrible. But the overwhelming inhibition on Ivy League campuses remains of chilling conservative speech. Among students and faculty you have to be brave to support the Supreme Court’s judgments on affirmative action.
Somewhat later:
Summers: The Democrats acted with due process and circumspection, engaged in dialogue and did not summarily cancel funding. Even on the harshest judgment of the Ivy League on anti-Semitism, it is not Bob Jones University on race. When American companies make unwise decisions, government does not replace their management or change their taxation. Government should not be imposing strategy on universities. I don’t think government should start controlling things. There is a big difference between what is wrong with universities and what government power should legitimately be used to correct.
Bruni: Although Trump’s fusillade of provocative, puerile and just plain preposterous statements is such that we soon forget most of them, I remember clearly when he proclaimed: “I love the poorly educated!” I think he meant it. And I don’t think his assault on academia is primarily about squelching antisemitism or countering ideological conformity and liberal bias, though the latter at least is certainly relevant. But the attacks are more a cornerstone of his larger push to delegitimize — to vilify — experts and expertise, which get in the way of his complete control of the narrative and his twisting of truth. Am I too cynical?
Douthat: Certainly Trump is interested in delegitimizing institutions that challenge his claims about reality. (Though he’s still pretty happy to invoke Ivy League credentialism when he’s self-promoting — just get him started on his uncle who was a professor at M.I.T.!) But for people inside these institutions, the key lesson of Trump’s political success is that they already weren’t taken seriously as disinterested truth-seeking enterprises, and that the populist critique was pushing on an open door.
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