Summers to leave Harvard amid Epstein fallout

What happened

Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers is stepping down as a professor at Harvard over his close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, he and the university said Wednesday. Summers has been on leave from Harvard, where he once served as president, since the depth of his friendship with Epstein was revealed in emails released by Congress in November.

Who said what

The resignation “marks an extraordinary unraveling for Summers, long one of the most influential figures in American economics,” The Harvard Crimson said. His “standing began to collapse” after the cache of released emails showed he “regularly exchanged messages with Epstein about women, politics” and other topics after the disgraced financier pleaded guilty to soliciting sex from a minor in 2008, and up to “the day before Epstein’s final arrest” in 2019 on sex-trafficking charges.

Summers’ “stunning fall from grace” was the “latest fallout among high-profile academics over Epstein associations,” The Wall Street Journal said. Harvard Wednesday said mathematics professor Martin Nowak was on paid administrative leave “pending further investigation” of his Epstein ties, and Nobel laureate Richard Axel resigned Tuesday as co-director of Columbia’s Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute. Former Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), who later served as university president at the New School, told The New York Times Wednesday he had quit the board of clean-energy startup Monolith over concerns that emails showing he had met with Epstein in 2013 would “make it difficult for them to succeed.”

What next?

Summers’ resignation from all faculty and academic positions takes effect at the end of the academic year, but he stepped down Wednesday as co-director of a Harvard Kennedy School business-government center. Once “free of formal responsibility,” Summers said, “I look forward in time to engaging in research, analysis and commentary on a range of global economic issues.”