Academia, especially humanities, has gotten amazingly intolerant of any divergent viewpoints over the past decades. Harvard is among the worst in this case. Try to get a marginally right wing personality to speak at Harvard. Students, encouraged by administrators, have increasingly turned on any thoughts that are even nanometers outside of the groupthink line. Professors are better, but they have less power.
If that's true of Harvard, I wonder whether the nature of it there is different than at most universities.
For one reason, Lawrence Summers, quoted in the Crimson piece as "former University President", was actually very publicly forced out, over some things he said. I thought it was harmful for him to be speculating quite like he had done, but maybe administration and faculty didn't take the optimal lesson from that bad experience?
For another possible reason, Harvard is a unique global prestige brand, for the richest and most powerful, global is complicated and nuanced, the students tend to be very privileged and connected, and maybe Harvard has to be more globally diplomatic than most universities do?
