An article at Inside Higher Education describes the latest controversy regarding Harvard President Lawrence Sumners, who you might remember got into a whole lot of hot water over his comments that questioned women’s innate science abilities. Well, his latest comments surround the genocide of American Indians throughout American history, which many critics contend that Sumners minimized in a recent speech. His exact comments are as follows:

For everyone who was killed or maimed in some attack by European-descended Americans on the Native American population, for every conscious death that came in war, 10 were a consequence of the diseases that came to North America with the European immigrants. There are fragmentary accounts of a kind of early biological warfare.

You know, let’s wrap a blanket around somebody who has smallpox and then encourage some other people to use that blanket. But the vast majority of the suffering that was visited on the Native American population as the Europeans came was not a plan or an attack, it was in many ways a coincidence that was a consequence of that assimilation. Nobody’s plan. But that coincidence caused an enormous amount of suffering.

As the article further states,

In an interview with The Crimson, Summers cited scholarly works that back his view, and some of his critics in the article agreed that he was “factually correct,” but they said the remarks were offensive because they minimized the responsibility of the United States for the deaths of so many American Indians. Others criticized Summers for comments that they said stressed problems in Native American communities. The transcript does refer to such problems, and also calls for a renewed national focus on issues affecting American Indians.

You can judge for yourself whether Sumner’s comments were racist. At the least, they seem to establish a consistent pattern -- discussing sensitive and controversial topics in a rather haphazard and unskillful way. That sort of communication style may be alright for a typical high school student, but not for the President of the most prestigious university in the country.