The burden of being Summers

By Julian Delasantellis

Sometimes attributed to the early 20th-century Harvard University president, A Lawrence Lowell, is the quote, "There's a Harvard man on the wrong side of every question." He ought to have known, coming down on the bonehead side of a number of noted issues.

In 1916, Lowell opposed president Woodrow Wilson's nomination of Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court, wrongfully accusing the noted jurist of being a Zionist zealot. In 1926, appointed by the Massachusetts governor to lead a fact-finding commission in the matter of Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian communist immigrant laborers charged with a murder of an armored car guard, Lowell displayed none of the doubt coursing through the community about the fairness of the convictions to enthusiastically recommend their eventual execution.