It is hard to believe that Summers is being sincere. As anyone in Harvard’s orbit would know—especially a long-time professor and former university president—the politics of decolonization, critical race theory, and anti-Israel agitation has been a staple of public life on that campus for decades. And it is not a cause driven solely by misguided students: administrators, department leaders, and prominent faculty have all developed it, institutionalized it, or at least publicly deferred to the radicals who did.

One needs only to browse the current Harvard course catalog to see how deeply the rhetoric of “decolonization” has been embedded. One course, “Global Rebellion: Race, Solidarity, and Decolonization,” draws on critical ethnic studies, a subfield of critical race theory, and promises to promote “Black, Asian, Latinx, and Indigenous radicalism”—that is, left-wing ethnopolitics for everyone except whites and Jews. The goal, according to the course description, is to “discuss how BIPOC communities forged cross-racial, internationalist solidarities to rebel against global white supremacy.”

Another course, “Colonialism and its Postcolonial/Decolonial Afterlives,” features readings of Lenin and Frantz Fanon, the latter of whom argued that “violence is a cleansing force” that “frees the native from his inferiority complex” and “restores his self-respect.” The rest of the course description is a repetition of slogans from the old Third World revolutionary fronts, promising to “explore the relationship between empire and the rise of industrial capitalism, the significance of race, class, and gender in colonial extraction, and the modes of violence on which it was founded.” The solution? The usual metaphors: “refusal,” “resistance,” “postcoloniality,” and “decoloniality.”

[We spend large fortunes on higher education in this country to churn out debt-crippled radicals that are thoroughly indoctrinated in violent ideologies. Perhaps this is a good time to debate whether we should fund higher education AT ALL. We’re not educating these people; we’re providing them with a radical-Left day camp. — Ed]