This morning Larry Summers talked with me about the issues currently facing Harvard internally and externally.
I wanted to get Summer’s opinion because he’s openly critical of the Trump Administration’s authoritarian onslaught against Harvard, but he’s also been openly critical of the slowness of Harvard’s leadership to fight antisemitism on campus.
He and I last talked about Harvard on October 9th 2023, when he was very upset at then Harvard President Claudine Gay and her hypocrisy, as he saw it, by not outright condemning the October 7th attack on Israel by Hamas, given that the school’s leadership had been vocal in its condemnation of the murder of George Floyd and on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Silence, in his view wasn’t good enough. There need to be “consistent standards” he says in our conversation.
He has also not shied away from heaping both criticism and praise on interim president Alan Garber, who replaced Gay in January 2024. Summers thinks Garber has been slow to implement the recommendations of a task force on antisemitism, but great in the way he’s led Harvard’s resistance to Trump.
“I don’t think, frankly, they [universities], have done enough and that has created more room for the wildly unreasonable Trump Administration attacks to seem reasonable in some quarters,” he told me.
But, in our conversation he also issued the important caveat that the Trump Administration’s “authoritarian” edicts, banning students from Harvard because they are foreigners “is much worse” than any prejudice they might experience there.
Apologies for the frozen screen around the nine minute mark, around the moment when Summers, who is both Harvard’s Charles W. Eliot University Professor and President Emeritus, is saying that he’s never felt unsafe walking around campus and that he encourages Jewish friends to come to Harvard.
I am still trying to figure out whether the issue was on my end, or his end….or just because it was raining.
It’s ironic because, in our last couple of minutes, I ask Summers about his perspective on the brawl between Elon Musk and Donald Trump. (Summers is on the board of Sam Altman’s Open AI).
He tells me that he was surprised by the spat, given how close the two were, but he thinks that if he had to bet, in 75 years this decade will be viewed as the decade of technology and AI far more than it will be associated with any individual, including Trump, Musk or Xi Jinping.
“Tokens - the measurement of value within a large large learning model - will be more important than tariffs,” he quips.
That is in spite of the few moments earlier this morning when technology refused to work as it should!
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