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Protesters last week disrupted a Stanford University Democracy and Disagreement course in protest of guest speaker and former Harvard University president Larry Summers, according to a statement from Stanford officials. Summers was also U.S. Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration and is currently the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard.
According to the student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, Summers was there to argue against a wealth tax, and seven protesters got onstage and chanted “tax the rich,” calling Summers a “climate criminal,” among other acts.
The protesters were from Climate Defiance, said Nicky Gott, the Bay Area organizer for that group, adding that they were not students.
Stanford president Jonathan Levin and provost Jenny Martinez said in the statement that “the Department of Public Safety collected information from the disruptors and is referring the information to the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office. We are taking steps to ban these individuals from our campus, which is private property.” Gott said Monday that four protesters had, in fact, been banned.
While the “expression of divergent views is welcome,” Levin and Martinez said, “disruption in the classroom setting is a fundamental disruption of the university’s operations and of the enrolled students’ opportunity to learn.” They said students in the disrupted Feb. 25 class “vocally demanded that the demonstration stop so that the students could hear the speakers.”
Gott said Stanford was “just giving a platform for someone to almost infiltrate folks’ mind[s].” He said, “Why in the world would we continue to have tax breaks for all of these billionaires, when we have so many people impoverished? All of these communities are feeling the brunt of the climate crisis.”
Summers didn’t respond to a request for comment Monday.
