If Powerful Places Like Harvard Don’t Stand Up to Trump, Who Can?
The New York Times, April 3, 2025 – The U.S. government is trying to bludgeon America’s elite universities into submission. At stake is the future of institutions that graduated most of our recent American presidents and a vast majority of Supreme Court justices and that serve as drivers of our prosperity and shapers of our social values.
The Trump administration’s threats to withdraw billions of dollars in funding are little more than extortion. They must be resisted using all available legal means. Columbia University’s recent capitulation, in which it agreed to a raft of changes in an attempt to avoid losing hundreds of millions in funding, must not be emulated. Each act of capitulation makes the next one more likely. Each act of rectitude reverberates.
As in most confrontations, the merits in this one are far from one-sided. Critics of elite universities, including Harvard, where I am a professor, are right that they continue to tolerate antisemitism in their midst in a way that would be inconceivable with any other form of prejudice, that they have elevated identity over excellence in the selection of students and faculty, that they lack diversity of perspective and that they have repeatedly failed to impose discipline and maintain order.
And universities’ insistence that they be entirely left alone by their federal funders rings hollow in light of the enthusiasm with which they greeted micromanagement when they approved of the outcome, such as threats from Washington to withhold funds unless men’s and women’s athletic budgets were equalized. READ MORE
Larry Summers blasts ‘ludicrous’ claim by Scott Bessent
New York (CNN) — Larry Summers is fed up with the tariff defense made by his successor, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Summers, who served as treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, blasted Bessent’s claim that Chinese producers will bear the brunt of new US tariffs on imports from China.
“This position is contradicted by every introductory economic textbook and course of which I am aware,” Summers wrote in a post on X on Sunday. “What is the argument or authority for a claim that seems ludicrous?” READ MORE
CNN: Americans’ confidence nosedives on trade war fears
My interview with Wolf Blitzer and Pamela Brown on CNN’s Situation Room. “I fear we may be only in the second inning of our economic challenges unless the Administration is scared straight towards rational policy by the evidence surrounding it.”
CNN: Tariffs & Uncertainty
My interview with Laura Coates on CNN. “Trump’s tariffs are pretty much all downside as economic policy.”
Tariffs, economic uncertainty raise risk of recession
Many economists say tariffs and economic uncertainty are raising the risks of a recession. One of those economists is Larry Summers, a former U.S. Treasury secretary and former director of the National Economic Council.
Here & Now‘s Scott Tong talks to Summers about President Trump’s economic policies and why they are raising fears of a recession.
This segment aired on March 20, 2025.
Free Press: Larry Summers Thinks Trump’s Tariffs Are a Disaster
By Oliver Wiseman, The Free Press — We are at war. A trade war, that is. With China and—less explicably—Canada and Mexico. Donald Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada went into effect on Tuesday morning. This week, the administration also introduced an additional 10 percent tariff on Chinese imports.
Canada has responded with 25 percent tariffs targeting around $100 billion of U.S. goods. China retaliated too, blacklisting 15 U.S. companies and slapping 15 percent tariffs on American chicken, wheat, corn, and cotton, and 10 percent on other food. Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum has said she is prepared to respond with levies of her own. READ MORE
