Last week I found myself in Sun Valley, Idaho, at a conference with a lot of big wigs. Among them was Larry Summers—an economist, the Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton, and a former president of Harvard University. The timing was fortuitous.
Last month, Harvard went before the Supreme Court to defend its race-based admission policies—and lost the case, thus overturning the legality of affirmative action. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that those admissions programs quote, “cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause” of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution.
This ruling has led to a debate in American life about the future of higher education, and it’s caused many to question another admissions policy that numerous American universities have long taken for granted: legacy admissions, the policy of giving preference to college applicants whose family has already attended the school. In light of the Supreme Court ruling, legacy admissions have been scrapped at top schools including Johns Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon, and just this week at Wesleyan University.
So I wanted to sit down with Larry Summers to talk about the future of American higher education, whether eliminating legacy admissions actually goes far enough, what he thinks admission departments will do in the wake of the Supreme Court decision, and what he might have done differently as president of Harvard if he could go back in time. And lastly, what makes American higher education worth saving in the first place.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Just finished listening. As a retired high school teacher, I'm interested in Dr. Summer's perspective, but I am always confused by it. He always tries to have it both ways and thinks that by splitting hairs, he's being somehow, 'honest.' But the short section in which he praises American higher education by saying it was the birthplace of things like mRNA vaccines, Moderna and Google (he did not mention Facebook...), it told me all I needed to know, I think. mRNA is a not-ready-for-prime-time technology that has harmed millions of people and done very little to save anyone. Moderna is a criminal backwater pharma co. that has done nothing positive other than copy mRNA technology (see last statement), and Google? Sure--we all use it. And Google uses us. Thanks, Dr. Summers. I think I get you now. You're free to move along and become irrelevant.
he's everywhere and nowhere at the same time. He's raised the art of the Non-answer to a high art.