Summers: ‘Too Many’ Schools Have ‘a Double Standard’ that Downplays Antisemitism, It’s Been an Issue for Years

On Friday’s broadcast of Bloomberg’s “Wall Street Week,” Harvard Professor and President Emeritus and former Harvard President Larry Summers stated that “too many universities have…a double standard, where antisemitism doesn’t get the same regard” as other forms of hatred and stated that the issues of “antisemitism and BDS and boycott Israel” have been around for decades.

Summers said, “It remains a very difficult issue. Look, everybody should be allowed to have their say without being explicitly punished, even if that say offends people. No one should be doxxed. But every university president in America has a playbook for these kinds of situations. It’s the way they’ve responded to racial incidents or homophobic incidents on their campus, and the issue this month of antisemitic incidents is just as serious, maybe, in many ways, more serious, given what we saw, for example, at Cornell. And universities need to go to that playbook, which they’ve used often in the past. And too many universities have — I’m very sorry to say — a double standard, where antisemitism doesn’t get the same regard. Yeah, let’s absolutely debate the rules about free speech and hate speech and universities’ involvement in politics, those are important debates to have, but let’s have a single standard for all kinds of prejudice.”

He continued, “I’ve seen a lot, and I was somebody who was worrying about antisemitism and BDS and boycott Israel and all of that 20 years ago. But I have to say that I have been profoundly surprised and disappointed by what I have seen since these Hamas attacks on many college campuses, but [in] many other places as well. And that is something that I think all of us have to take seriously. I have been very glad to see the powerful way in which President Biden has addressed these issues in general, and the way in which he and his colleagues in the Education Department have addressed them in the context of college campuses. And I hope that that’s going to be an inspiration to others around these issues going forward.”

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