https://www.commentary.org/articles/ruth-wisse/harvard-lawrence-summers-claudine-gay/
Forgive me for quoting myself, but there’s no other way to begin: “History rarely issues us a red alert. But the surrender by America’s premier university to its anti-intellectual assailants marked a point of no return. Responsibility was so equally distributed among the administration, Board of Governors, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the main players that I saw no way the damage could be repaired.”
This was my verdict on Harvard when I retired from the university a decade ago after having witnessed the ambush and dismissal in 2006 of Lawrence Summers, whose appointment as president five years earlier had given me hope that the decline I had tracked would now be reversed. From the moment Summers arrived, he showed bold leadership, addressing the main areas of my concern. But his every initiative also alerted his ideological opponents, who proved so skilled in cultural combat that they were able to damage him almost immediately and to bring him down in record time.
There was no inquiry at the time into the factions that mobilized against the president, leaving them free to further influence policy and squelch opposition. Now by curious inversion, we see that Claudine Gay, recently installed as 30th president of Harvard, has been upended by the very crisis in education Summers had tried to avert. Although opinion will vary over what led to Gay’s resignation, several of those controversies—over the university’s role in society, anti-Semitism, academic standards, and affirmative action or “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”—were precisely the ones that were “weaponized” against Summers, but for opposite ends.
Currently, at least four groups from inside and outside the university—alumni, faculty, administration, and government—are looking into what has gone wrong at Harvard. While the aborted Gay presidency is but a symptom of that damage, and the resignation itself brings no necessary change, anyone hoping to understand what is at stake in higher education would do well to study the defenestration of Lawrence Summers. He has personally transcended that debacle, but Harvard has not.
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In submitting this testimony, let me clarify my role as participatory witness. Soon after I came to Harvard in 1993 as first occupant of the Martin Peretz Chair in Yiddish Literature, I was made director of the Center for Jewish Studies, which required my presence at faculty meetings I had seldom attended during my previous tenure.
