Last week, Columbia University announced that it had reached an agreement with the Trump administration, agreeing to pay $220 million in penalties to appease the Trump administration’s anger towards the institution and restore federal grants that were canceled by Trump. In addition to this payout, Columbia agreed to adopt the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism, allowed the Trump administration to force them to overhaul the student disciplinary process, submitted to a monitor, and committed to ending “DEI” practices.
Inside Higher Ed quoted Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, reflecting what most serious academics have been expressing about Columbia’s surrender: It “represents the upending of a decades-long partnership between the government and higher education in which colleges and universities nevertheless retained academic freedom, institutional autonomy and shared governance. It signals a rise in authoritarian populism[…]. Nevertheless, former Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers has been an enthusiastic supporter of this plan, calling it an “excellent template for agreements with other institutions including Harvard” and claiming that it contributes to the “strengthening the commitment to intellectual excellence” of the university.
Of course, for Summers, intellectual excellence is largely defined as aligning with his politics. He also claimed that it will help the university by “promoting merit-based admissions and hiring,” (signaling his support for Trump’s war on DEI), something Summers had issues with while President of Harvard University, as he presided over a historic drop in job offers to women (under his presidency, tenured positions offered to women fell from 36% to a mere 13%) while claiming that women’s brains were simply not meant for topics like science and math.
Unfortunately for Summers, his toadying of Trump’s authoritarian war on academia was not enough to save him from the president’s wrath. On Monday, the President attempted to deflect attention about his own connections to known pedophile Jeffrey Epstein by highlighting Summers’ close ties to the convicted sex offender, saying “I never went to the island, and Bill Clinton went there supposedly 28 times. I never went to the island, but Larry Summers, I hear, went there, he was the head of Harvard.” While obviously a vain attempt at self-preservation, Trump’s not wrong; Summers reportedly maintained a close relationship with Epstein even after his 2008 conviction for solicitation of prostitution with a minor under the age of 18.
The whole exchange is an instructive demonstration of why one should never bend under pressure to an ill-tempered, mercurial bully, even if you share a close friend.