Erwin Chemerinsky (Washington Post), Trump is targeting law firms and academia. Why don’t they speak up?
Lawrence H. Summers (N.Y. Times), If Powerful Places Like Harvard Don’t Stand Up to Trump, Who Can?
Dean Chemerinsky is a distinguished constitutional scholar and dean of the law school at U.C. Berkeley. Prof. Summers is many things, including former Secretary of the Treasury and former president of Harvard University. Each of them bemoans the failure of many rich law firms, and many prestigious universities, to stand up to Trump.
And good for them. Let us all bemoan the cowardice.
And let the record reflect that I, Ronald W. Davis, who attended Princeton, Harvard, and Columbia, hereby bemoan Harvard’s and Columbia’s failure to stand firm. And I hereby celebrate the position of Princeton’s president. I hope and expect he and the university will continue to stand firm, and, if they do, when Annual Giving rolls around, I will do the right thing. As, I believe, will my fellow alumni.
At the same time, I suggest that we all spend about 2% of our time bemoaning this or that and the remaining 98% of our time in hard-headed analysis and strategizing. And, here in the real world—not the one we wish we lived in—I suggest that for most people, most of the time, the most salient questions are
Is the authoritarian project going to take root, in which case I and my organization had best accommodate to it?
Or is the authoritarian project going down the shitter, in which case I and my organization can just keep our heads down and wait it out?
To help answer those questions, you might want to look to the town halls, the election results on Tuesday, and the condition of the financial markets this afternoon.
Facing MAGA 