Alan Rusbridger writing in Prospect
Do you remember Julian Assange’s catchphrase, “Courage is contagious?” I think he may have borrowed it from the old Bible basher Rev Billy Graham, but no matter: it had a catchy ring about it. …
Sadly, there is something even more contagious: cowardice. There is a lot of it. In the US today, it is spreading very rapidly, and there seems to be no known cure…
Back to universities: You’ll be amazed to hear that, following Columbia’s surrender, the Trump administration has decided to “review” roughly $9bn in grants and contracts awarded to Harvard…
A former president of Harvard, Larry Summers, called out what was happening in a punchy piece in the NYT this week. He accused Trump of trying to “bludgeon America’s elite universities into submission… Each act of capitulation makes the next one more likely. Each act of rectitude reverberates.” …
As Summers argued: “Institutions such as Harvard, the administration’s most recent target, have vast financial resources, great prestige and broad networks of influential alumni. If they do not or cannot resist the arbitrary application of government power, who else can? Without acts of resistance, what protects the rule of law?”