Obama to University Administrators: Stop Sucking
By 
Barack Obama rarely speaks out. He should–I very much wish he did a lot more. But when he does speak, it’s for a reason and it tends to be to people he think will listen. So talking directly to university administrators and telling them to quit being cowards is a good thing.
Former President Barack Obama, in a campus speech on Thursday, urged universities to resist attacks from the federal government that violate their academic freedom.
He also said schools and students should engage in self-reflection about speech environments on their campuses.
“If you are a university, you may have to figure out, are we in fact doing things right?,” he said during a conversation at Hamilton College in upstate New York. “Have we in fact violated our own values, our own code, violated the law in some fashion?”
“If not, and you’re just being intimidated, well, you should be able to say, that’s why we got this big endowment.”
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Mr. Obama’s advice to lean on the endowment in the face of threats and stand on principle was also endorsed by his former economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, in a guest essay this week in The Times. “Believe me, a former president of Harvard,” Mr. Summers wrote, “when I say that ways can be found in an emergency to deploy even parts of the endowment that have been earmarked by their donors for other uses.”
To many on the right, and even some on the left, one reason Mr. Trump is attacking higher education is because universities have become politically weakened, partly because they haven’t taken the free-expression concerns of conservatives seriously.
In his remarks on Thursday, Mr. Obama also called on law firms, which have also faced threats from the Trump administration, to stand for their principles, even if they risked losing business.
Mr. Obama told the crowd, which included college students, that everyone should stand up for the rights of others to say wrong and hurtful things.
“The idea of canceling a speaker who comes to your campus, trying to shout them down and not letting them speak,” Mr. Obama said, according to a transcript on his Medium account, “even if I find their ideas obnoxious, well, not only is that not what universities should be about, that’s not what America should be about.”
He added, to applause, “You let them speak, and then you tell them why they’re wrong. That’s how you win the argument.”
It’s pretty fucking bad if Larry Summers is lecturing you on values. And for what it’s worth, I do think that cancel culture was a very bad thing and the response to it was problematic. If no other reason than it helps the other side win.