Just last month, Summers staged a demonstration against an installation by Harvard’s Palestine Solidarity Committee, The Harvard Crimson reported, calling the installation “the moral equivalent of racism.” Now it’s Summers’s morals that are being questioned.

NB: This man is a racist and a criminal.

By Nell Gluckman November 21, 2025

The sinkhole that may subsume Summers wholly is not a #MeToo scandal, a case of financial mismanagement, or an unpopular take given during a speech. It’s something more embarrassing and clownish. Newly released emails between Summers and the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein show a much cozier relationship than was previously known. The revelations may anoint Summers president of a new fraternity of academics who tainted their reputations by buttering up to a known sexual predator. Summers declined an interview request.

Previous scandals never truly diminished Summers’s powers, at least not in the eyes of other powerful people. Once President Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary, he served as Harvard’s president for nearly five years before resigning after a faculty no-confidence vote. But he was appointed director of President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council in 2009 as the president made key decisions about how to steer the country out of the Great Recession. Harvard gave Summers the title of university professor, a distinction reserved for its very top scholars, after his departure as president. He has served on various nonprofit boards in recent years.

But all that public influence may be slipping away. Included in the 20,000 Epstein-related documents that House Republicans released earlier this month were numerous exchanges with Summers spanning the decade leading up to the disgraced financier’s final arrest. Harvard said it will begin a new review of their relationship. Summers resigned from the board of OpenAI, as well as several other organizations he helped lead. One high profile role remains: his tenured faculty position.

Summers’s Harvard presidency included a trio of controversies that ultimately led faculty to lose confidence in him. Early on, he criticized the Harvard professor Cornel West for his political activity and for recording a rap album. West, a leading scholar of African American studies, left for Princeton University. In 2005, Summers told attendees at an economic conference that one reason women were underrepresented in the top tiers of science and mathematics might have been innate biological differences from men. And he was still president when the university paid $26.5 million to settle a federal lawsuit involving Andrei Shleifer, a Harvard economist and friend of Summers, who was charged with conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government. (Neither the professor nor Harvard admitted liability as part of the settlement.)

In the years since, from his perch as a professor of economics at Harvard, Summers gave regular commentary about finance, higher education, and politics. More recently, he wielded his power to blast Harvard for what he viewed as its failure to protect Jewish and Israeli students in the wake of the war in Gaza and subsequent protests.

And as Harvard undertook high-stakes negotiations with the Trump administration to restore billions of dollars in withheld federal funding, its former president was outspoken, first criticizing what he saw as federal overreach but then arguing that Harvard should view a deal with the government as “a desirable thing.”

Just last month, Summers staged a demonstration against an installation by Harvard’s Palestine Solidarity Committee, The Harvard Crimson reported, calling the installation “the moral equivalent of racism.”

Now it’s Summers’s morals that are being questioned. His relationship with Epstein has long been known, stretching back before Epstein’s first indictment in 2006. But the new revelations appear to show that Summers sought Epstein’s guidance when the professor was pursuing a romantic relationship with an economics mentee, The Crimson reported. Summers, who has been married since 2005, told Epstein that he suspected the woman was interested because she valued the famed economist’s professional connections. Epstein, the newspaper reported, referred to himself as Summers’s “wingman.”

The Crimson also reported that flight logs showed that Summers and his wife visited Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean in 2005 during their honeymoon. The island was later alleged to be the location where many of Epstein’s crimes took place.

The email exchanges about the mentee took place between November 2018 and July 2019. The Miami Herald had published an explosive series of investigative reports into the myriad allegations against Epstein in November 2018. Epstein was arrested again in July 2019 and charged with sex trafficking. He died in jail the following month in what was deemed a suicide.

Harvard’s latest investigation will examine all the ties between “individuals at Harvard” and Epstein that were exposed in the newly released documents, a university spokesman said. A 2020 report found that the university had accepted more than $9 million from Epstein between 1998 and 2008. Summers will not teach while the university investigates, according to The Crimson.

Faculty members reached by The Chronicle said few at Harvard would miss Summers if this scandal marks the end of his time there. But what should happen to his place on the professoriate is a separate matter, some said.

“I have yet to encounter a single person who is defending him, who feels sorry for him, or who thinks something unjust is going to happen to him as a result,” said Timothy Patrick McCarthy, a lecturer on education in the Kennedy School and in the Graduate School of Education. “For a lot of people in this community I think there’s been a sense of astonishment at Larry Summers’s staying power over the years.”

Kirsten Weld, a history professor and president of Harvard’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said any evaluation of Summers’s status at the university should follow the same due process any other faculty member would receive.

“It needs to be undertaken as part and parcel of the work of shared governance,” she said. “And faculty need to play a role in that.”

https://www.chronicle.com/article/is-this-the-end-for-larry-summers-at-harvard

************************************************