At the Aspen Ideas Festival, Summers pins blame for current antisemitism on the 'ideology' of the 'intersectional left'

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Former Harvard President Larry Summers, right, speaking on Thursday with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the Aspen Ideas Festival.
Between mini-lectures on monetary policy and the disruptive potential of artificial intelligence in a Thursday talk at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Larry Summers, the former Harvard president and Treasury secretary, offered a sweeping denunciation of higher education’s failure to take moral stances, particularly as antisemitism on American campuses has become widespread.
Summers offered this rebuke amid a monologue about the role of universities in taking positions on controversial issues, arguing that academics should be allowed to say what they want — even “offensively antisemitic things” — but that university leaders and their boards similarly have an obligation to respond, making clear that they reject such extreme views.
“Being brilliant is different from being wise,” Summers said, earning cheers from the audience. “I look at the dialogues that take place on many of these campuses, I see things like the virulent antisemitism professed by people who are really eminent scholars. I don’t agree with the Bill Ackman world that tends to think that because they’ve said some offensively antisemitic things they shouldn’t get to be great scholars. But I sure think universities should make clear that it, as an institution, doesn’t approve of what they’re saying, and it certainly isn’t going to allow them to speak for it.”
Instead, Summers added, he has seen the opposite. “I think there’s been an abdication of responsibility pretty universally on the part of university trustees to meet this responsibility, and I think ultimately they are the ultimate fiduciaries of these institutions, and I think for the most part they have failed,” said Summers.
He did not specifically name Harvard in those remarks, although he has at times sharply criticized the university’s handling of the campus climate after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel that sparked a wave of antisemitism and fervent protests.
Summers’ comments came a day after Harvard released an interim report from its campus antisemitism committee with an early set of recommendations about how to improve the situation on campus. The report faced criticism from some in the Jewish community, including Harvard Chabad Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi, who said the document was “glaringly missing what is exposed and visible for all to see.”
Now an economics professor at Harvard, Summers agreed: “I did not object to anything that was in the antisemitism task force report,” he said. But he pointed out several items that he thought were conspicuously absent.
“I couldn’t help but notice that a component of Harvard has entered into a partnership with a West Bank university that supports terrorism and that was not referred to; that another component of Harvard has come pretty close to calling Israel war criminals on behalf to the university and that was not referenced in the task force; that fairly obvious inadequacies of discipline were not referenced in the task force,” said Summers, who said he would “measure my words” in discussing the report. “This was an interim report, and we have to hope that the return — that the performance will be much better on the final than it was on the midterm.”
New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin, who moderated the conversation with Summers, asked him why he thinks antisemitism has become so common on many campuses. Summers started with an acknowledgment that antisemitism is not a new phenomenon for universities — “there’s been 3,000 years of history of antisemitism, and antisemitism is an important part of the history of great universities in the United States” — but ultimately pointed the blame at leftist ideologies.
“I think in terms of understanding the current antisemitism, it is basically that whatever your intersectionality left ideology is, brown versus white, rich versus poor, European versus non-European, whatever it is, Israel has become the focus of it,” said Summers. “Those ideologies have come to have immense attractiveness on the left and on college campuses.”
Summers then suggested a point of introspection for those who “really and honestly think that human rights for Palestinians and opportunities for Palestinians are the central challenge of our time, so that they should be the defining thing of what’s happening at universities.”
“If you are a person who discourses at great length on that topic, and never mentions — never — either the injustices that are happening to other peoples, or the sins of others besides the Israelis with respect to the Palestinians,” said Summers, “I have to say that your motives are deeply, deeply suspect and that is a comment on many, many people on our college campuses, including some who lead them.”
The role of great institutions of higher education, Summers argued, is to create space for big conversations and future leaders, rather than setting the agenda for them.
“It is enough to provide the intellectual frameworks for all the people who are gonna lead society, and to be a major source of ideas and concepts going forward on everything from gender roles to radioactivity. We should do that and not try to argue about, This is more socially just than the other thing,” Summers said. He avoided mentioning other campuses directly, but he took an indirect jab at Maurie McInnis, the newly appointed president of Yale, and an email she sent to the Yale community after her appointment was announced in May.
“One of America’s great universities just appointed a new president who, in an opening statement, said something about how we should all be the change we want to see to bring about a better world,” Summers said. “I thought it was a fundamental misapprehension of the purpose of a great university.”
Speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Sian Beilock touts university as a ‘different kind of Ivy’ — one not facing a civil rights investigation

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - MAY 21: Sian Beilock, President, Dartmouth speaks onstage during The Wall Street Journal's Future of Everything Festival at Spring Studios on May 21, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images)
ASPEN, Colo. — At the end of a school year marked by strife at campuses around the United States, few prestigious universities have managed to avoid the accusations of discrimination and harassment that have now become routine as higher education institutions grapple with the fallout of the Israel-Hamas war.
Dartmouth College may be the rare exception. Speaking at a panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Monday, Dartmouth President Sian Beilock was introduced with a rare accolade: Dartmouth is the only Ivy League college that has not faced a federal civil rights investigation over its handling of allegations of antisemitism and Islamophobia on campus.
“I’m really proud of where Dartmouth is and what Dartmouth is, and I always go back to what the North Star of Dartmouth is,” Beilock said. “We are a different kind of Ivy, and we have one serious goal, which is to find students from the broadest swath of society, bringing them to campus, give them the tools to disagree with each other, to debate, to have civil dialogue, so they can go out and be the next leaders of our democracy.”
Dartmouth has earned national recognition for its approach to Oct. 7 and its aftermath, and the resulting campus protests. For two years, the university has offered a class on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that is co-taught by an Israeli professor and a former Egyptian diplomat who worked on the Middle East peace process. In Beilock’s first email to the Dartmouth community after Oct. 7, she clearly condemned the Hamas attack and spoke of the need for dialogue — a value touted at other universities, but one that Beilock quickly put into action by organizing two public forums on the conflict with professors from both the Middle East studies department and the Jewish studies department.
Those public offerings “set the stage for a lot of what we’ve able to do,” Beilock explained, because “they showed what it’s like to have nuanced conversation across difference.”
The school saw more than 25 protests on the war, Beilock continued, but she made clear why no encampment was able to last at Dartmouth beyond a few hours.
“One thing that we were clear about from the beginning is that protests can be an important form of free speech. But there’s a difference between protest and then taking over a shared space for one ideology and excluding another. That is taking over someone else’s free speech. That is not at the heart of our academic mission,” Beilock said. “As such, we’ve been very clear about the consequences of having encampments on campus.”
Her quick removal of the encampment earned condemnation from the university’s faculty, who voted to censure her for calling in the police after an encampment popped up in May.
Beilock spoke alongside outgoing Colorado College President L. Song Richardson, whose handling of campus protests and an anti-Israel encampment differed starkly from what happened at Dartmouth. Richardson negotiated with campus protesters, who took down their encampment after she acceded to several of their demands. Among them was a concession that student activists can bring their demands for divestment from Israeli companies to the school’s investment committee.
“We allowed the encampment to remain in place. We had meetings with those who were camping out and reached an agreement to have conversations with our board, and then they voluntarily took down the encampment a few days before our graduation,” Richardson said. She said they followed the same playbook the university used when students sought divestment from fossil fuel companies.
At Dartmouth, Beilock said the university’s investment committee does consider ideas from Dartmouth stakeholders including students. But she cautioned against factoring in political considerations too strongly when it comes to shaping the school’s endowment.
“The endowment is not a political tool. I’ve said that very clearly,” Beilock said. “The goal of the endowment is to generate resources so that we can do things like financial aid.”
Without naming any other institutions, Beilock took aim at universities that have gone too far in considering politics in how they make decisions.
“I’m really concerned about some of my peers and what they’ve done to circumvent the processes that they’ve had in place for many years,” said Beilock. “I don’t think that’s the best way to get to an outcome where you’re thinking about the longevity of an institution and creating a space where the institution is not the critic, but you support and foster critics on both sides themselves.” Among an audience of philanthropists and executives, Beilock earned loud applause.
Beilock, who joined Dartmouth a year ago after six years as the president of Barnard College, blamed the campus turmoil at least in part on a lack of ideological diversity at elite institutions.
“We haven’t been good enough about making sure we have voices across the political spectrum on campus in enough of a way that allows them to constantly be practicing having these difficult conversations across difference,” Beilock said. “I’m recommitting to that.”