Centuries of Dysfunctional Organizational Culture: The Mob at Yale

Jonathan Edwards fell out of favor with Yale’s president Clapp, who opposed George Whitefield’s Christian revivals as being too “enthusiastic.” So, Clapp had two pamphlets published to criticize Edwards, who had studied and then taught at Yale. In fact, one of Yale College’s residential colleges has been named after Edwards at least since the late twentieth century. I would imagine that few if any current or former JE students have been informed that Edwards ceased attending Yale Commencement exercises and even visiting campus once he had known of Clapp’s vitriolic pamphlets. It is ironic that in Edwards’s time, Yale’s faculty minimized the impact of original sin in what became known as the New Haven theology. It seems that compassion for people who hold a different theological (or political) view, as in “Love thy enemy,” was nonetheless above the grasp of Yale’s administration. Fast-forward from the first half of the eighteenth century to roughly three hundred years later and incredibly the same hostile, highly dysfunctional organizational culture was still well ensconced at Yale.

The full essay is at "Centuries of Dysfunctional Organizational Culture."

On Yale’s Anti-Conservative Ideological Faculty

In 2025, “Yale professors made 1,099 donations to federal political campaigns and partisan groups . . . Not one of the recipients was Republican.”[1] Other than the 2.4% of the donations that went to independent candidates or groups, the rest—97.6%—went to Democrats. In that same year, U.S. President Trump became very publicly critical of elite private universities receiving federal research dollars while being so partisan (i.e., Democrat-leaning). Trump may have been more concerned that the universities benefit by receiving the indirect-expenses portions of federal research-grants while the professors infuse their personal ideologies, which are in conflict with conservatism, into their lectures. I took many, many courses, including at Yale, in my formal and post-doctoral education, and the infusion of a professor’s ideology—nearly always progressive—was not uncommon, especially at Yale.

At a “Roundtable Conversation,” albeit without any table whatsoever being used, in March, 2025, Yale’s “Race, Migration and Coloniality in Europe” working group sponsored three speakers to speak on “Europe’s Authoritarian Turn: Right Wing Politics and Where to Go from Here.” The focus was on the AfD (Alternative for Germany) party, which had finished second that February in the Bundestag election behind the CDU (the Christian Democratic Union). Yale’s own Fatima El-Tayeb touted academia in general, and the humanities more specifically, as having great potential in building and maintaining a repository of knowledge immune from the push and pull of political autocrats. El-Tayeb’s blind-spot, however, was on the salience of political ideology operating under the subterfuge of neutral scholars and scholarship.

Jeff Klein of the Multitudes Foundation advocated that Germany should ban the AfD party because, he said, it wants to get rid of democracy. Extricating the votes of the Germans who had voted for the AfD was somehow in line with democracy. This inconsistency alone attests to the salience of Klein’s anti-conservative ideology. He argued that were the AdF group to get a plurality of votes in the next election without any other groups joining in a majority coalition with the AdF group, democracy itself would be discredited and weakened.  To have a governing party with only a plurality rather than a majority in the Bundestag would at the very least render democratic governing unstable in that legislative chamber, but not anti-democratic. Klein’s next statement, that “the AfD should be banned in Germany,” evinced questionable reasoning from a democratic standing. Out of a concern that AfD might curtail democracy, Klein was curtailing democracy by advocating that a significant number of voters be effectively disenfranchised. He was utterly unaware of his own contradiction.

That virtually none of the Yale students and faculty in the room would have even questioned Klein’s anti-conservative ideology (nobody raised a critical question in this regard) supports my experience that an overwhelming proportion of students and faculty in Yale College and the Graduate School (excluding the professional schools) are and have been at least since the early 1990s (in my experience) anti-conservative progressives, politically (including social issues). Even though Yale interviews prospective faculty members because of their past outstanding scholarship, I suspect that the interviews serve as a litmus test on how well the applicants would “fit in” at Yale. It is not that political progressives are smarter than conservatives, so the scholarship is not what makes the Yale faculty so liberal as a group. Rather, while on campus both in the 1990s and in 2023 and 2025 (one term each), I could not help but pick up on the severity of the ideologically-left intolerance in too many students and even faculty members. The distinction of “insider” vs “outside” is not lost on Yale’s professors as well as even the non-academic managers whose arrogance vastly outstrips their academic credentials. The comfort in acting out unfairly on the basis of ideological intolerance is the elephant in the living room at Yale. The university’s public statement on December 23, 2025 that “Yale hires and retains faculty based on academic excellence, scholarly distinction, and teaching achievement, independent of political views” is an outright lie; if that statement were true, the extreme ideological bias in the political donations by the faculty would be a statistical anomaly that could only have truth-value on the island of misfit toys.[2]

The charge that Yale is and has been rife with progressive, or “liberal” political ideology even infused in academic lectures has much more validity than Trump’s accusation that Ivy League universities were antisemitic since 2023 just because they allowed pro-human-rights students to protest against what the ICC and UN both determined to be a genocide in Gaza being committed with impunity by Israel. In fact, Yale’s “police department” arrested 47 students in 2024 for protesting Israel’s genocide even though those students had the same kind of tent-protest-area in Beinecke Plaza that striking graduate-student teaching-assistants had had in the 1990s. Yale did not break up that encampment. Also, Yale’s presidents both in the 1990s and in 2024 were both Jewish. That Yale went after the protesting students was actually a move in the pro-Zionist favor. So Bruce Ackerman, a law professor at Yale and presumably a Zionist, was on an utterly wrong-headed crusade when he tried to “out” anti-Semites at Yale. That the administration could alternatively have valued and even encouraged students to value human rights and thus oppose crimes against humanity is something that Ackerman and other Zionists on Yale’s faculty would have been at pains to outwardly oppose.

Back in 2023, when I was back at Yale translating a theological and ethical text, I walked out of the main library one day to spontaneously join a march for the innocent residents of Gaza. Three young men, aged in the mid-20s, were walking next to me. “We’re Jewish,” one said to me. “I don’t care what background people come from; we are standing up for human rights.” The three guys and I even stood together at the end of the march in New Haven’s central park, the Green. Bruce Ackerman would have been at a loss to explain us had he been present. Maybe he was busy writing a check to the Democratic Party, which, like the more conservative major group in the U.S., was busy taking orders from the AIPAC at the expense, ironically, of liberal Democrats. If Yale’s faculty were at all concerned about the crimes against humanity that Israel was committing from 2023 at least through the time of the study on the donations, sending money to the Democratic Party was not the smartest move by “the smartest guys in the room.” This is obviously not to say that all of the professors’ respective donations were made to support the Zionist genocide or other conservative causes. After all, Yale’s “police department” arrested 47 students who were protesting against the genocide in 2024.  

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1. Jaeha Jang, “Yale Professors Donated Overwhelmingly to Democrats in 2025,” The Yale Daily News, January 14, 2026.
2. Ibid.

On University “Police Departments”: Accountability at Yale

Whereas in the E.U., universities do not have their own private police departments because the state governments hold the police power, the situation in the U.S. has devolved from such democratic accountability such that even small colleges (and even hospitals!) typically have their own “police departments.” This presents the unwitting American public with a potentially problem of conflict of interest: in disputes between a college or university administration, which is not democratically elected, and stakeholders, including students and the general public, the organizational police forces take orders from one side. This is especially problematic in cases, such as at Yale, in which the organizational police employees patrol off campus—off the university’s own “territory”—and arrest people who are unaffiliated with Yale and have not even been on the campus. Such a usurpation of the prerogative of the city of New Haven comes with the loss of democratic accountability.

When I was back at Yale as an alumnus during the Spring, 2025 term to conduct academic research, a local resident who worked at a local New Haven hospital told me that Yale police employees arrest local residents coming out of bars, presumably when those Yale employees assume that “a local” could potentially menace Yale students. That the university “police” employees have been given the power by Connecticut to arrest people beyond Yale’s property does not imply authority to go on routine patrols outside of Yale. 

Although Yale police vehicles routinely travel between the medical and the main campus in New Haven, seeing the cars off that route, off-campus, on city streets, was not uncommon from at least 2023.

I suspect that the power to make arrests off-campus was premised on the assumption that such arrests stemmed from an incident on the campus. If so, then the statement of Yale’s “police department” that it would also investigate a Palestinian flag that a protester had placed on a Jewish symbol in New Haven’s central park, which is called New Haven Green, rather than leave the matter to New Haven’s police department represents just the sort of overreaching that such a slippery slope enables, especially when a thirst for more power is present. 

A New-Haven police car in the city's central part, the "Green," in 2025. The presence of Yale police there defending Yale's "truth" by investigating a political flag there could be considered "over-kill."

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, an academic administrator in Yale’s School of Management, defended the overreach by stating that Yale needed to “defend its truth.” I contend that for a non-governmental private organization to bring up truth in connection to having police-power is dangerous. Put another way, for Yale to use its police-power to enforce the administration’s ideological conception of truth itself on city property is such a blatant over-reach that the very notion of a university “police department” can be flagged as inappropriate in a republic. From the European students in the U.S. whom I’ve met, the notion itself is nothing short of strange. Today, in early 2026, I would be tempted to suggest to such students that U.S. President Trump use Yale’s “police force” to invade Greenland because Yale’s guns have invaded New Haven rather than restrain themselves to Yale (while of course being able to chase culprits off-campus and arrest them).

On an edge of Campus (Chapel St) in 2025, a Yale "police" employee suddenly pulled up to a bus stop and showed his car's head-lights on the Black local-residents  at the bus-stop. 

So it is more than disconcerting that although a city ordinance enacted in 2019 required the Civilian Review Board of New Haven’s police department to “’develop a memorandum of understanding’ with the Yale Police Department” so the city could be made aware of complaints registered by local residents and Yale students against Yale “police” employees, Yale Daily News reports that “progress on the agreement was slow-moving.”[1] It would not be until January 1, 2026, interestingly just after the departures of the chiefs of the New Haven and Yale police departments, that an agreement went into effect such that “all policing agencies that are operating within city boundaries have some kind of citizen-led review process for complaints.”[2] The Yale Police Advisory Board, which was “meant to review civilian complaints against the Yale Police Department,” had even been “discontinued without an announcement to the city or University” in 2024.[3] “Its successor, the Public Safety Advisory Board, took shape in the fall of 2025 . . . The newly formed board’s charter does not mention civilian complaints.”[4] So the agreement commencing at the start of 2026 may be more about communicating with the city than any realization on the part of the university’s administration that using its police-power to defend Yale’s truth on local streets and parks might result in complaints not only from students, but also from local residents who have nothing to do with the university. Although Alyson Heimer, formerly with the Civilian Review Board, confirmed that as of January 1, 2026, “all policing agencies that are operating within city boundaries have some kind of citizen-led review process for complaints,” she also said, “We should be really proud that we actually have something in [sic] paper, a written agreement, to have reporting and transparency between the agencies. I think it’s really important.”[5] 

I suspect that as Yale is a private (non-profit) organization, Yale’s core administrators would not have been excited about local residents being able to complain about a Yale department, and as for the students, the outgoing director of Yale’s “police department” referred in an email to students who were protesting for human rights in Gaza as “losers and criminals.” He quickly accepted the invitation of the FBI to train Yale’s “police” employees in counter-terrorism tactics that could be used on Yale students. Fortunately, the university did not, at least as far as I know, charge the students more tuition to cover the added service—the response from students could be, Thank you; hit me again, Sir.

I agree with the typical European reaction that I have encountered against universities, whether state-related or private (non-profit or for-profit), being lawfully able to have their own “police departments.” I contend that police power is an inalienable, and thus non-transferrable, power of a public government. In the E.U. and U.S., there can be both federal and state (including municipal) police, either of which can be enhanced rather than such a core governmental power being “subcontracted” out to organizations. Unless the American electorates object to the existence of organizational “police departments” and insist that organizations stick with security guards (who should not be dressed like police so as to mislead “civilians”), more organizations—even companies including grocery stores—could receive authority from a government (after some well-placed political-campaign contributions) to have their own so-called police departments. Police could be everywhere, using constant intimidation itself as a deterrent, which was the case at Yale at least as of 2023.

At the very least, electorates would benefit from being shown the institutional conflict of interest that exists when an organization’s management has “police” employees who can do the management’s bidding in disputes with stakeholders, including students and local residents.[6] When Yale’s “police” employees were busy arresting 47 students for being in tents on Beinecke Plaza on campus to protest against the genocide taking place in Gaza with impunity, it is telling that Yale students protesting the university’s draconian action went to a nearby intersection because then those students would be under the jurisdiction of New Haven’s police, who did not arrest any students—and they promptly cleared the intersection at 5pm for rush hour as requested by the New Haven police. Meanwhile, Yale’s “police” employees on the scene were falsely claiming that their jurisdiction did not include city streets—even though Yale’s “police” cars could be regularly seen on patrols on city streets even at a distance (i.e., blocks) from Yale’s property, which, by the way, I witnessed as I walked along Howe Street in 2025. It is interesting, in other words, that Yale’s “police department” claims to keep to Yale’s campus when the public eye is on, while on weekend evenings employees of that same department patrol city streets and even arrest local residents coming out of bars. Similarly, I suspect that any public statements by Yale’s administrators that complaints from “civilians” would be taken seriously, as per the agreement with the city would actually be lies meant to mislead the public eye.

Yale police conduct surveillance of undergraduate Yalies relaxing on May 1, 2025 on Cross-Campus lawn a day before the final exams began. If the students were being watched and intimidated by a Yale police-employee in a "lit-up" police car because the administration or its "police chief" feared spontaneous pro-Gaza protests on the day before finals, then the administration/police knew nothing about how seriously Yalies take final exams. 

Being both loyal and yet critical (of conscience) to an alma mater is a difficult balance to achieve, especially after having encountered so many nasty administrators and arrogant faculty-employees on campus. Maybe the Crimson at Harvard will get to share in the fun of being critical by conscience of their university’s police-power once Campbell, who headed Yale’s department, gets settled in at Harvard in 2026. As stated by Yale Daily News, Campbell, the protestant minister who had described human-rights students at Yale as “losers and criminals” in 2025, “decamped” to Harvard at the end of that year.[7]

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1. Adele Haeg, “New Haven, Yale Reached Accord on Police Oversight before Chiefs Left,” Yale Daily News, January 15, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. In my book, Institutional Conflicts of Interest, I argue that given the inevitable susceptibility of temptation felt by humans to exploit such a conflict of interest, the very existence of an institutional conflict of interest is unethical, even before exploitation occurs.
7. Adele Haeg, “New Haven, Yale Reached Accord on Police Oversight before Chiefs Left,” Yale Daily News, January 15, 2026.

On the Pros and Cons of AI in Science

Will there eventually be an automated lab run by artificial intelligence? Could AI someday order equipment, conduct reviews of prior empirical studies, run experiments, and author the findings? What does this mean for scientific knowledge? Is it possible that foibles innate to how we learn could be avoided by AI? Can we provide a check on the weaknesses in AI with respect to knowledge-acquisition and analysis, or will AI soon be beyond our grasp? It is natural for us to fear AI, but this feeling can prompt computer scientists obviate the dangers so our species can benefit from AI in terms of scientific knowledge.

The full essay is at "On the Pros and Cons of AI in Science."

Educating Scholarly Priests: The Cult at Yale

Speaking at a Bhakti-Yoga conference in March, 2025 at Harvard, Krishma Kshetra Swami said that scholars who are devoted to the academic study of religion are also undoubtedly also motivated by their religious faith, even if it is of a religion other than what the scholar is studying. The Swami himself was at the time both a scholar of Hinduism and a Krishna devotee. He was essentially saying that his academic study of Hinduism was motivated not just by the pursuit of knowledge, but also by (his) faith. He also stated that he, like the rest of us in daily life, typically separated his various identities, including that of a professor and a devotee of the Hindu god, Krishna. Although his two roles not contradictory in themselves, a scholar’s own religious beliefs, if fervently held, can act as a magnet of sorts by subtly swaying the very assumptions that a scholar holds about the phenomenon of religion (i.e., the knowledge in the academic discipline). To be sure, personally-held ideology acts with a certain gravity on any scholar’s study in whatever academic field. Religious studies, as well as political science, by the way, are especially susceptible to the warping of reasoning by ideology because beliefs can be so strongly held in religion (and politics), and the impact of such gravity can easily be missed not only by other people, but also by the scholars themselves.  

The full essay is at "Educating Scholarly Priests."

Larry Summers’ Emails to Epstein: Indicative of the Cult of Harvard

Should instructors themselves lead righteous, moral lives if they are going to be allowed to teach college students? Does the character of a teacher matter? Should a professor be inclusive rather than exclusivist? These questions are distinct from the much more easily answered question of whether convicted criminals should be allowed to teach college students. Harvard’s Larry Summers, the last U.S. Treasury Secretary of the Clinton presidency, a president of Harvard University, and a professor there, came to personify these moral questions in November, 2025 after Congress released a trove of Jeffrey Epstein’s email exchanges with Summers. Besides resigning from the board of OpenAI, Summers attempted to continue teaching, but then suddenly announced that he was taking a leave of absence from Harvard even though the semester had just a few weeks remaining (including Thanksgiving break). If as I suspect Harvard’s administration pressured him to bow out, at least temporarily in a leave of absence, the irony would be that such a sordid organizational culture casted one of its own kind away. I contend that Summers’ case at Harvard is more complex than first meets the eye.

If the personal ethics of a professor matters, then an ethically-challenged organizational culture can be counted on to protect its own unless sufficient external pressure is brought to bear on the administration. Tehat U.S. Senator Warren, who represents Massachusetts, called for Harvard to sever ties with Summers may have swayed the otherwise stubborn academic administrators to sacrifice one of their own even though he fit so well in that squalid, exclusivist organizational culture. Ironically, U.S. President Trump’s charge that Harvard was antisemitic because the university was allowing pro-human-rights students to protest in line with academic freedom and free speech was sparked at least in part, again ironically, by Summers’ personally-biased claim that Harvard was against Jews even thought the university’s president was Jewish. It is also ironic that Harvard having become a police-state of sorts even in Harvard Yard is in no small measure due to Summers’ erroneous claim of antisemitism. In short, the plot concerning Harvard and Summers is much deeper and more troubling than outsiders know. In fact, Summers was part of the problem of exclusivism there, as he actively sought to have the university treat visiting researchers in residence for a semester or more as outsiders—scholars as the general public or library patrons without access to online articles and books, or to talks at Summers’ school of government.

Harvard’s administration, steeped in the toxic art of passive aggression, is good at hiding what it is actually like being at Harvard on a daily basis, and Summers played an active role in perpetuating the organizational brain-sickness. With regard to Summer’s sudden leave of absence from teaching, it should be noted that in the immediate wake of the release, Summers was not accused of raping any of the adolescent girls at Epstein’s house or private island. But he had corresponded with Epstein for decades until July 5, 2019, a day before Epstein was arrested on federal sex-trafficking (of minors) charges. In fact, Summers asked Epstein for advice on how to get a woman, one of his “economic mentees,” “horizonal.” Epstein gave him unsavory advice. Summers’ efforts to have sex with a young woman “mentee” raises the question of whether as a professor at Harvard, Summers pressured any of the young women studying under him at Harvard; graduate students can be particularly vulnerable. At the very least, his attitude and beliefs about the academic aptitude of female students were a red flag. “With Democrats out of the White House, Summers returned to Harvard in 2001 as the university’s president. His tenure was defined by tumult, particularly in the wake of a 2005 speech at a conference about improving diversity in science and engineering. He suggested that women were less represented in those fields because of ‘intrinsic aptitude.’”[1] Combine this with his primitive way in which he discusses his conquests of younger women, perhaps even some being from among his students, and a creepy odor can be detected that is a red-flag concerning Summers being anywhere near female college students.

To be sure, shortly after the emails were made public, Summers admitted even to his students in a class at Harvard that he had used very bad judgment in having stayed in contact with the pedophile ring-leader. This may have been a reputational and possibly job-saving operation; he even asked his students for permission to continue as their teacher, which signifies deceit because professors do not need the permission of students in order to teach. That crafty rhetoric dovetails with the way he characterizes his sexual advances in his emails to Epstein. This “creepy” factor is even more damning than is the fact that Summers stayed in contact with Epstein for so long even as Summers was teaching undergraduates at Harvard.

It may be wondered whether Summers even liked and respected Harvard, for he had complained in an email to Epstein that hitting on a few women was apparently worse as far as Harvard was concerned than the history-department faculty accepting a woman as a Ph.D. student even though she had been convicted of killing her boy. Appearances aside, I contend that Summers fit in well with, and was a part of Harvard’s sordid organizational culture. He had been president of Harvard, after all, so his interiorizing of the organizational culture should not come as a surprise. A dysfunctional, in-grown, presumptuous, and downright rude and passive-aggressive organizational culture of a university, and any organization, is much more intractable and thus difficult to undo than is cutting ties with an professor who has displayed horrible moral judgment in regard to sexual ethics. If an institution employing too many rude, pretentious, and disrespectful people happens to be very rich—the richest university in North America—then organizational slack can enable even such a place to endure for a very long time and even be able protect itself from public scrutiny and even accountability.

U.S. President Trump was onto something in going after Harvard, but he was wrong about Harvard being what Summers claimed—antisemitic—just because some students protested on behalf of human rights amid the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Just as Bruce Ackerman, another Jewish professor, but at Yale, went after student protesters, Summers had accused Harvard falsely. The university’s real fault lies in its unduly restricting its academic resources, especially in its main library, to scholars who are not on Harvard’s faculty, and Summers refused to correct this abysmal instance of passive-aggression against invited guests. Harvard’s tax-free status should obligate the administrators to make its extensive online and housed books and articles available to scholars who are not on faculty at Harvard, given that the Ph.D. (and J.S.D., and D.B.A., and D.Sci.M, and Ed.D.) are academic-use credentials, whether the person is in industry or at another university. I explained this to Summers in person, but he refused to contact the head librarian so that I, as a visiting research-scholar, could access online books and articles in 2024 and 2025, by which time access to online materials for academic use had become vital to being able to conduct research in the humanities. With this context concerning Summers in mind, the question of whether a professor must be leading an ethical life outside of the classroom in order to be able to continue to teach can now be considered in full, with the presence of an overarching dysfunctional organizational culture complicating the dynamics.

The bearing of a teacher’s personal beliefs, whether religious or moral, goes back to why Socrates was put to death. The ancient Greek philosopher stood accused of corrupting the youth because he allegedly did not believe in the gods and goddesses in the Greek pantheon. Socrates was righteous; he even refused efforts of others to help him escape from the local jail before being executed because he believed that a person’s duty to one’s city should not be only when the “weather” is good. To the men who accused the philosopher of having corrupted the ideas of students, the personal beliefs and conduct of a teacher did matter, a lot.

In ancient China, the Confucian philosopher Xungi wrote the following on the importance of a teacher being righteous: “if people follow through along with their inborn nature and dispositions, they are sure to come to struggle and contention, turn to disrupting social divisions and disorder, and end up in violence. So, it is necessary to await the transforming influence of teachers and models and the guidance of ritual and the standards of righteousness, and only then will they come to yielding and deference, turn to culture and order, and end up under control.”[2] An unrighteous teacher cannot be transformative by guiding students to learn more about how to behave in a way that is not greedy, power-hungry, and disrespectful of other people. Xunxi castigated Menchus, another Confucianist, for positing the existence of “moral sprouts,” such as benevolence, in human nature. Righteousness and benevolence have to be learned and practiced by “deliberate effort” according to Xungi, and the role of a teacher is crucial because this cannot be forced.[3]

On the other hand, contemporary colleges and universities are not purposed to transform students into being benevolent and righteous people; rather, classes are oriented to particular subject-matters, such as chemistry, history, mathematics, sociology, law, and medicine. A teacher need not be righteous in order to convey and explain the knowledge in these and other subjects, including science and engineering that according to Summers are inherently difficult for the female brain to learn. He could teach global economic policy regardless of what he had written to Epstein on other matters. Transforming sordid elements of human nature into benevolent and righteous channels—mastering rather than repressing the bad dispositions in human nature—is not in the mission statement of a secular university. In fact, since 1980, college students had been increasingly career-oriented in selecting a major. This category-mistake, as flawed as it is, at least demonstrates how far contemporary, non-religious universities (and even some that are religiously-affiliated) had come from the ancient days when teachers were to be role models.

Even that amoral trajectory is not immune from criticism. A professor of medicine who looks the other way when students studying for the first (and thus undergraduate, as the D.Sci.M. is the terminal degree in schools of Medicine) degree cheat rather than reports those students to the dean’s office is surely not the sort of character that universities should tolerate even just from an academic standpoint.  Besides the obvious breach of academic standards, who would like to have a surgeon who, back in medical school, had been encouraged by a professor to cheat? When I was in an undergraduate class in computer science, my one and only course in that field, a student who was planning on going laterally to medical school next asked me during an exam if he could cheat off me. I wouldn’t want him as my physician.

Similarly, how many parishioners would be pleased to hear that their church’s minister or priest had been encouraged to lie about his or her real religious beliefs on a church-board exam in order to be ordained?  Among Episcopal students at Yale’s divinity school while I was a student at Yale (mostly in religious studies, history and film studies, but also in theology), lying on the Episcopal Church’s exam that, yes, the Resurrection did in fact happen empirically and historically rather than just nominally in the Gospel stories was not uncommonly done, according to more than one seminarian/Yale student. They justified lying by the good that they could do as future priests. The lack of integrity absolutely pertained to ministry, but deans at Yale’s divinity school could have argued that what graduated students do on their vocational boards is extrinsic to the university in having conferred a degree, just as what graduated medical students do during their hospital residency rotations does not pertain to medical schools. Furthermore, The point that graduation is a matter of having learned enough of the knowledge being taught in the courses is valid; applicants for degrees are not put through morality tests before being accepted, and ethical problems would go along with such a requirement. So Richard Fern, who taught Christian environmental ethics at Yale when I was a student, was ethically wrong when he told me, because I asked academic questions beyond the Christian creed, “A student must have a certain character to get a Yale degree.” Decades later, I nodded affirmatively (and with surprise at the insight from “the other school”), when more than one first-degree student at Harvard’s divinity school told me that Yale’s school had the reputation of being a cult. What those Harvard students did not care to reveal was that Harvard’s divinity school was an exclusivist, intolerant “woke” cult, which included even reconfiguring Hinduism as a monotheist faith to suit the Abrahamic Westerners. Summers’ erroneous accusation that Harvard was antisemitic fit within that ideological bias.

Aside from Summers’ attitude and creepy conduct in trying to get younger women “horizontal,” his bad judgment, shown not just in regard to Epstein, can be argued to be a valid justification for why he should not have been teaching after he was pressured to resign as Harvard’s president ironically for what he had said about the inferior aptitude for science and engineering. As U.S. Senator Warren said after the release of the emails, “For decades, Larry Summers has demonstrated his attraction to serving the wealthy and well-connected, but his willingness to cozy up to a convicted sex offender demonstrates monumentally bad judgment.”[4] Warren went on to say that “Summers could not be trusted to . . . teach a generation of students at Harvard or anywhere else.”[5] It was in 2019, while he was teaching at Harvard, that he sent an email to Epstein “discussing interactions he had with a woman, writing: ‘I said what are you up to. She said, ‘I’m busy.’ I said awfully coy u are.”[6] She could have been one of Summers’ students. Epstein replied, “you reacted well. . annoyed shows caring., no whining showed strentgh” (sic).[7] Summers’ demonstrated lack of moral judgment went beyond remaining in contact with Epstein after his guilty verdict; he would be a risk, maybe even a predator, to his students who are young women. After all, office hours are not to be geared to getting a student “horizontal.”

Furthermore, Summers’ emails with Epstein could be just the tip of the iceberg concerning his malevolent, pushy character, and ironically, how much his sordid character was in line with Harvard’s callous “insider” culture that goes so far as to intentionally treat some people there as if they were outsiders. When I was a visiting research-scholar in the Liberal Arts at Harvard, I went to one of his talks at Harvard’s school of government. One of my mother’s cousins had been Larry’s first economics teachers in high school, so I was surprised when I stepped forward to introduce myself, that his question was, “How did you get in?” I didn’t know if he meant how did I manage to get into Harvard, or into his talk, as I had introduced myself as a visiting research-scholar in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Visiting research-scholars, unlike Fellows and visiting professors who teach, have Harvard IDs but not Harvard email addresses. I told Larry that I had registered and shown my ID at the door. Like mischievous clockwork, a month or so later a Harvard email address rather than just an ID was required to register for and attend any talk at the Kennedy school of government at Harvard.

Also indicative of Summers’ fit with Harvard’s inside-cadre, I asked him to intervene with Harvard’s head librarian, for, before I had applied to Harvard, a librarian had assured me that I could download online books and articles using two computers near the circulation desk in Widener Library but not with my Harvardkey log-in. A month or so after I arrived to do research, those two computers were changed such that they no longer gave the access that is available “to any student or faculty member,” as I had been told and relied on in coming to Harvard. The university librarians, including hostile and disrespectful Francesca at Widener library, did not even apologize for having reneged. For librarians to be so dismissive and rude to scholars, whether on the faculty or visiting, highlights the sheer presumptuousness that was, and no doubt still is, so salient among the dominant coalition of employees and managers, including librarians, there. It is poignant that visiting scholars doing solid, long-hours research daily would be such easy prey for non-academic employees who are not themselves academic colleagues of scholars, whether on faculty or visiting. As for the faculty, including Larry Summers and Ben Friedman, both economists, they did not lift a finger. They had no sense of what being a good host of academic colleagues meant. I suspect they conveniently delimited “colleagueship” to fellow faculty members at Harvard, which is an artificial bias, given that the Ph.D. is the academic credential (which Francesca did not have and yet presumed superiority at a university).

Regarding Friedman, I regularly sent him findings from my research that were relevant to his, including my translation of Pierre Nicole’s essay on self-love and charity. When I asked for his help towards the end of my stay, he threw up his hands and said, “Oh, no! I can’t email the special collections person for you. I don’t know your work. I’m not sponsoring you.” So, Larry Summers fit alongside his colleagues in treating visiting researchers on campus for longer than a semester as if we were the general public, or as mere library patrons and thus outsiders without any affiliation to Harvard even though the university issues university ID’s to us. I was doing more at Harvard than what one librarian characterized me as doing: “being in a library,” as if I were a library patron. For one thing, my Harvard ID number allowed me to sit in on courses as a guest scholar.

One class was in history, taught by Henkins, who with his teaching assistant sent me a very rude email that even though Henkins had invited me to attend his lectures, I was not allowed to speak to Henkins. Another class was Latin. Because Francesca at Widener library was uncooperative (and even rather hostile generally to me) refused to extend my library access to the end of my last semester at Harvard, I asked

Ivy Livingston, the professor of Latin, to write a brief note affirming that I could enter Harvard yard to attend her class and study in the Classics building should a security guard confront me because my access to the library had not been extended and the librarians and a security guard at the divinity school had erroneously thought that my only access at Harvard was to the libraries. In fact, Harvard’s administration refused to allow my Harvard ID access to a sandwich/salad shop in the Yard![8] Starkly refusing, Livingston said, “I can’t give you permission to study on campus unless you have an affiliation.” That she had given her permission for me to be a guest scholar/student in one of her classes did not depend on my access to the library. Her rigidity and utter lack of any willingness to be cooperative turned me off to such an depth that I immediately ceased my study of Latin at Harvard. The use of “affiliation” as a passive-aggressive, exclusionist weapon was too strong of a bad odor for me to breath.  As Nietzsche conveys in his writings, the strong breath heathy, clear air in self-confidence, whereas the weak who seek to dominate can only breath the stagnant air of a hospital, given their innate weakness and resentment of the strong.

Aside from the overzealous Securitas subcontracted guard at the divinity school, a shift-head at Widener library repeatedly sought to bully me by staring at me in an intimidating way. I reported the guy to his boss, and his Securitas boss housed in Widener was himself a bully to me for bring the matter of his “very good employee” to him with photos as proof. Francesca refused to intervene on my behalf, which is why I think she was so uncooperative in extending my access to the library to the end of the Fall, 2025 term; it was a case petty retaliation because the librarians liked the mischievous guard. Larry Summers fit well in that sordid culture, whereas I saw its pettiness as a smallness of character. Trump should have gone after those with such a sense of exclusivity and entitlement. The presumptuous of self-entitlement is like arrogance on stilts; it should naturally be under water rather than lording itself above us mere mortals.

Another irony is that Larry Summers’ false accusation against Harvard as being antisemitic triggered Harvard’s administration to instigate its private police employees into being omnipresent in Harvard Yard and near the science center, and even the divinity school, to watch students. By overdoing the visuals of “presence” to intimidate the undergraduates and even graduate students so they would not stand up in protest for human rights as they were under assault in Ukraine and Gaza, Harvard can be understood as projecting the squalid likes of Summers and several other insiders there onto the threat being external, whether in students or the public, which strangely includes visiting research scholars whose academic credentials are reckoned as doormats ripe for mud rather than respect. In other words, overdoing the private police presence on campus reflects back (as mental projection) on there being more than a few nasty, passive-aggressive people in key positions in the university’s hierarchy.

Such  dysfunctional, self-entitled organizational culture is more dispersed than just one man, and so it is much more difficult to get rid of than Larry Summers. Just as Ben Friedman betrayed me by refusing to do me a small favor even though I had shared my translation of Pierre Nicole’s essay ironically on self-love and charity and many other research findings for over a year (and yet he claimed mendaciously not to know my work!), Harvard’s defensive elite turned on Summers. That he was one of them made no difference to the sordid cadre that runs Harvard with impunity. Trump should have gone after this rather than Summers’ biased charge of antisemitism. Having harbored Summers for decades, and being so petty at the library with research-scholars in residence for an extended period of time, and, moreover, in being so brazen in sending messages of exclusion, Harvard’s administration has a lot to answer for. Unfortunately, the organizational slack and defense mechanisms afforded by the wealthiest (and yet untaxed) university in North America mean that the dominant coalition will go one, unimpeded even while Larry Summers, who was 70 when he took (or was handed) his leave of absence in 2025, is no longer of concern as a retired man who could still write books in his field, for in that respect, in contributing to the knowledge in economics, his personal ethics do not matter.

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1. Steven Sloan, “What to know about Larry Summers, who has taken leave from Harvard due to Epstein emails,” The Associated Press, November 19, 2025.
2. Xunzi, The Xunzi, Pp. 248-91 in Philip J. Ivanhoe and Bryan W. Van Norden, ed.s. Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy. New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2001, p. 284.
3. Ibid.
4. Ryan Grenoble, “Elizabeth Warren Calls For Harvard To Cut Ties With Larry Summers,” The Huffington Post, November 17, 2025.
5.  Ibid.
6. Steven Sloan, “What to know about Larry Summers, who has taken leave from Harvard due to Epstein emails,” The Associated Press, November 19, 2025.
7. Ibid.
8. Even though I was a guest in a class in the divinity school in the fall term of 2024, a security guard in that building misread my ID and claimed that I could only be in the library, and thus my arrival 30 minutes before the divinity library to buy a breakfast sandwich was not allowed. Interestingly, as in revealing the dominant mentality at Harvard, some administrator at the divinity school put up a sign on the main doors enforcing the library-access-only policy for visiting research-scholars.  I never returned to that school; the stench of religious hypocrisy was too much for me. Bad air! I had even volunteered to help set up a business-religion center at the school, but the dean, who had urged me to email her, did not reply when I did. When passive aggression even lays waste to the profit motive (and potential alumni donations to a new center), you know something is wrong in America.

Harvard's own police keeping an eye on employees protesting just outside of Harvard Yard. In labor-management relations, for one side to have its own private police dept is unfair. Notice the man watching me take a picture at a greater distance than the zoomed 

Harvard's private police employees even patrol off campus

That Harvard's police-employee is displaying his car in the Yard is itself indicative of a provocative, pent-up or latent "bully" mentality. There was no incident in the Yard to justify the show of force to students walking in the Yard. 

This Harvard police-employee was watching people entering Harvard Yard even as Larry Summers was teaching at Harvard invisible to the naked eye. Not even a hyperextended private police presence oriented outward to the public and even students could reveal or even be oriented to the sordidness within Harvard's dominant coalition, or "elite" cadre.

What a revealing picture! Notice that the police car's "incident" lights were (perpetually) on, essentially turning the status quo into an ongoing incident-level presence. 

Imagine being a teenager in college and having to literally face a manned police car on campus.

Overdoing police and security-guard presence in Harvard Yard did nothing to flag Larry Summers.

A Harvard police-employee had the brights on, blanketing the Yard as if it were a Nazi concentration-camp. Summers was not the only Harvard employee with bad judgment. 

Amid Scandal and Political Protests: A University President Goes Down

Beyond legitimately taking credit and assuming blame for a myriad of things, a university president ought first of all to be an academic scholar, which comes with the credential of a doctorate in a field or school of knowledge. Rather than a specific body, or school, of knowledge subject to research (and thus growth) being directly applicable to the position, I contend that the process, which includes being enculturated in academia as a scholar, of getting a doctorate is valuable and thus should be requisite to a candidate being selected to lead a college or university. In short, a university president is not just a manager. It would be expedient, in line with committing the “sin of omission,” to have a corporate executive, or, even more expedient, a lawyer, run a university. The governing board of Northwestern University in Illinois committed this “sin” in hiring Michael Schill, a law instructor, as president of that university. Just three years after assuming the position in September, 2022, he abruptly resigned. A memo to that board upon his resignation announcement could read: “Memo to the Board: Yale Law School trains lawyers, not university presidents.”

Even though Schill attended two elite universities, Princeton and Yale, his two respective degrees were “first degrees”—one in liberal arts and the other in law. Hence he did not have a doctorate, which is a terminal (rather than first) degree in a school of knowledge. For the confused, the JD degree is the same as the LLB (bachelors in the letters of law) degree whereas the LLM is the masters degree in law and the JSD is the associated doctoral degree, for which both the LLB/JD and LLM are prerequisites. Plain and simply, a year (up to two) of survey lecture courses and a year (up to two) of survey courses mark an entrance into the knowledge rather than years of advanced seminar study—not to mention the absence of comprehensive exams (not the Bar exam, which is vocational rather than a university requirement for a degree) and a dissertation—the latter two being essential in a doctoral degree. Besides being qualitatively different than survey courses and some seminar-electives, the process of getting a doctorate, which is on top of having a bachelors and a masters degree, “socializes” a student into academic culture, which students in a first degree in a professional school or that of the arts and sciences do not get. Both in assisting in teaching and research, doctoral students are absorbed into a university not just as students and part-time apprentice-employees, but also as budding scholars themselves. Internalizing the values of academia and its unique culture also happens by osmosis.

As a scholar myself, it is difficult for me to put myself in the place of a lawyer to grasp how one leading a university would perceive and react to political protests on campus. Although Schill studied public policy at Princeton, he was apparently not up to managing the university’s response to “the freeze of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding” to Northwestern by the Trump Administration, for that was a significant factor in his decision to resign.[1] A scholar having successfully gone through the process of earning a doctorate would—other things equal—have a better notion of how the role of student at a college or university is unique to education; students holding protests on campus against Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, which includes genocide and maybe even a holocaust, should be seen as evincing academic freedom of ideas, rather than just as citizens (and foreign students) being engaged in the constitutional right of political protest. In short, student protests can be viewed as learning experiences, such that university administrations could see to it that faculty who are favorably inclined speak as much to educate as to advocate at protests on campus. A lawyer is not likely to view a political protest on campus as a temporary “practical classroom experience.”

Schill’s lack of scholarly credentials (and related academic maturating experience) also bear on another reason behind his resignation. In July 2023, Northwestern fired football coach Pat Fitzgerald “amid a hazing scandal that led to lawsuits across multiple sports with allegations including sexual abuse by teammates as well as racist comments by coaches and race-based assaults.”[2] At least some of that atrocious behavior occurred under Schill’s watch. As a lawyer, he would naturally have been most concerned about the lawsuits that sprang up like tulips in spring. It should come as no surprise at all that Northwestern hired a law firm to do a review of the scandal, and, furthermore, that the report by Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison was “largely positive” for Northwestern, with a lawyerly subordinate clause noting that investigators found room for improvement in preventing hazing.[3] Most importantly, and hardly accidental, having room for improvement does not acknowledge any negligence or liability. All of us have room for improvement; this is the human condition.

Attempting to obviate lawsuit payouts by means of carefully crafting wording is very different indeed from how a scholar would look at the situation and react (with hired lawyers to take care of the legalese). That students were being harmed, in some cases severely and whether by coaches or fellow students, has academic importance not just in terms of the impacts on academic study, but also in terms of the wider picture of students being in the care of universities other than in the sense of being subordinate or just as customers.

This can be seen in the live-in directors of on-campus dorms in which young-adult students live, having almost a parental role in terms of disciplining bad behavior. A dorm contract is not just a lease, and the occupants are not just tenants. The “something more” is what I’m getting at here, and this is familiar to people who have gone through doctoral programs in which students become scholars in the midst of academic culture. Once I applied to be a dorm director at a university; I was naïve enough to think that my MBA would be sufficient; the university wanted candidates who had a masters in education (counseling). That was before I became a scholar and could thus realize how a university is so much more in a distinctly academic sense, and thus as something more organizationally than just having business elements. Both such elements, and legal elements, are not primary, so hiring lawyers (or business executives) to head universities is not wise, and universities are presumably ultimately about knowledge as wisdom, rather than about training in skills.

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1. Annie Ma, “Northwestern University President Says He Will Resign Following Tenure Marked by White House Tension,” The Associated Press, September 4, 2025.
2. Andrew Seligman, “Investigators Recommend Northwestern Enhance Hazing Prevention Training,” The Associated Press, September 4, 2025.
3. Ibid.