What Harvard Is Whispering About Larry Summers
Rosie Couture, a senior at Harvard College, is not enrolled in The Political Economy of Globalization, but last week she attended twice. According to the official description, the class explores “why globalization — which has provided decades of prosperity and peace — is currently in turmoil.” Taking it satisfies the Ethics & Civics requirement. Until last week, it was co-taught by Professor Larry Summers.
Couture, who is also an organizer with the campus Feminist Coalition, went to class Tuesday to see how Summers might respond to the recent release of his long, cozy, and sometimes lecherous email correspondence with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, right up to Epstein’s second arrest in 2019. When she got to the classroom, students were whispering, some with their laptops open to the Crimson’s stories on the emails and on the high-profile institutions (Bloomberg, Brookings, the New York Times ) shedding affiliation with Summers. “And somehow the only thing he’s really doing,” Couture says, “is teaching young women at Harvard?”
From the front of the class, a plainly diminished Summers said the students might have seen his apology elsewhere for “what I did in communication with Mr. Epstein. And that I’ve said that I’m going to step back from public activities but — for a time. But I think it’s very important to fulfill my teaching obligations. And so with your permission, I’m gonna — we’re going to go forward and talk about the material in class.” Couture posted the video on social media, where it soon went viral.
That Summers, the university’s former president, cultivated Epstein’s presence and money on the Harvard campus and flew on Epstein’s jet has been in the public record for years, but the new dimension of ick shown in the emails released by a congressional committee has set students and faculty aflame.
In them, the married Summers sought Epstein’s advice on his attempted seduction of a decades-younger professor, a former Harvard student from China who, Summers said, seemed to mainly consider him an “economics mentor.” He and Epstein called her “peril” — as in gaming out the probability of ”my getting horizontal w peril,” as in, at least plausibly, the racialized and sexualized historic trope of Asians posing a danger to the West and needing to be conquered.
By Couture’s next class visit Thursday, Summers was gone and his co-professor, Robert Lawrence, read tentatively from a piece of paper: “As I’m sure you are all aware, Larry has decided to step down from his teaching responsibilities this semester. I’m really sorry for the undoubted disruption it’s going to cause all of you. We will miss his insights and his wisdom.”
Couture hadn’t planned on saying anything, she tells me, but she couldn’t help herself. She shouted, “No, we won’t!” On the video, also later shared on Instagram, a man can be faintly heard, retorting, “Yes, we will!”
Until recently, it seemed that Summers could enjoy a place in the permanent elite no matter what furious criticism or outright disgrace came his way. In 2006, his Harvard presidency ended under pressure from its governing board. The year before, a faculty vote of no-confidence denounced his bruising leadership style and a speech he gave spitballing that underrepresentation of women in science was owed more to “issues of intrinsic aptitude” than “what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.” Nonetheless, Barack Obama, infuriating progressives who opposed Summers on ideological grounds, recruited the former Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton to direct his White House’s National Economic Council to dig out of the Great Recession. (Political pushback did kill Summers’s candidacy to chair the Fed; a woman, Janet Yellen, overcame her gender’s intrinsic inferiority to serve instead.) Summers even survived the public airing of his closeness to Epstein; some of the damning details reported last week, including Summers’s postnuptial visit to Epstein’s island with his wife, who was also hitting up Epstein for donations, had already been public but hadn’t quite stuck. People were still welcoming Summers to their boards and the initiative to chart the Democrats’ path out of the Trump-era wilderness, and they paid attention to his tweets.
Then came this tranche of emails, which showed that Summers kept turning to Epstein as a friend and “wingman” even the day after the Miami Herald began publishing fresh reporting in 2018 on the extent of Epstein’s depravity and impunity. “U have returned to the press,” Summers wrote laconically to Epstein that day. “Short lived, no worry,” Epstein replied. Summers seemed to eagerly seek the approval of a man who had already been convicted of soliciting a minor; at one point, he asked Epstein, “How is life among the lucrative and louche?” And seemingly unrepentant after his 2005 remarks, Summers sophomorically told Epstein of a recent speech, “I yipped about inclusion. I observed that half the IQ In world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population …”
But it’s Summers needily seeking advice on the apparently unwelcome pursuit of a Chinese economist — of him hypothesizing that she “finds me invaluable and interesting,” and if he can “get her to conclude she can’t have it without romance/sex without deciding I’m weak or vengeful” — that has stunned even his fiercest critics.
“That he was vindictive, that he was mean-spirited, that he was a bully, that he was crass, that he showed no loyalty to anyone but expected loyalty from them, that he thought highly of himself, that we knew,” says Timothy Patrick McCarthy, a lecturer on education and public policy who has taught at Harvard since 1998 — but no one I spoke to expected him scheming to seduce a mentee. (The woman discussed in the emails, economics professor Keyu Jin, did not respond to a request for comment and has not spoken publicly about the matter.)
“Even as someone who thought he was very hard to predict and contained multitudes of contradictions, this is still utterly bewildering,” says a Harvard economist who knows Summers. “Have I ever heard him say somewhat misogynistic things? I definitely have. If I’m comparing him to other super-high-powered and privileged men I’ve met from his generation, he’s probably average. Which is a healthy chunk of misogyny.” Another Harvard faculty member who has worked with him over the years says, “Basically, everyone is sort of shell-shocked.”
Until now, the two men cited above, who requested anonymity to speak freely, had mostly favorable views of Summers as a brilliant colleague, even as they sometimes questioned his people skills. Now, they are disturbed to see him yukking it up in the emails with Epstein about hitting on his mentee. They point out that Summers championed and promoted women in the field — most famously his former student and chief of staff Sheryl Sandberg — but also top economists such as Yale’s Natasha Sarin and MIT’s Anna Stansbury, all three of whom have sung his praises as a mentor and repeatedly defended him over the years.
Summers, the Harvard economists tell me, had enjoyed quiet support over the years from fellow centrists who shared at least some of his public opinions — campus culture had become too censorious, pro-Palestinian campus protesters were antisemitic, Claudine Gay wasn’t up to being Harvard’s president, or the Biden administration was stoking inflation — though unlike Summers, few wanted to say so publicly.
But after the Epstein emails, one of these men says, “There is a collective exhaustion here at Harvard. How many times are you going to put your friends and the university through the wringer because of your stupid decisions? No one I know feels sorry for him. And many of these are people who felt bad for him and defended him at the end of his presidency in 2005 and 2006.” Instead, they’re sending every new Crimson link to each other on group chats, wondering what Summers could have been thinking. Was it pure fealty to power and money? Did Epstein have something on him? Or was it just Shakespearean hubris?
You could forgive faculty who had tangled with Summers for enjoying some Schadenfreude this week; one imagined Gay punching the air in vindication. But there is little actual joy, or much more visible activism, on a campus that several people described to me as still haunted by the scrutiny of the Trump administration. “There is a pall that has been cast over this campus,” McCarthy tells me. “This place is virtually unrecognizable from three years ago. People are afraid, people are self-silencing. There’s an incredible fear and anxiety about the broader political climate and how it’s going to impact people. There’s enormous concern about job security.”
It remains to be seen just how much goodwill Summers still has among Harvard’s leadership. The university’s president, Alan Garber, paid his respects, if with a few good-natured digs, at Summers’s 70th-birthday celebration last year. The university has said it will investigate — again — Epstein’s ties to Harvard in the wake of new information. But Summers holds the highest possible rank of professor, along with tenure and its job protections, and Couture points out that no one from the administration has said a word to students about the Epstein emails. “For there to be no acknowledgment from across Harvard University to the students, it’s ridiculous to me,” she says. “Summers should resign himself. Not in a few months. Now.”