Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers during the World Economic Summit in Washington in April, 2024.MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images
Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers will resign from teaching at Harvard University as the campus reviews his ties to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the university announced Wednesday.
Prof. Summers, who has been on leave since November and whose name appeared hundreds of times in newly released Epstein files, will step down at the end of the school year, according to a statement from Harvard spokesperson Jason Newton.
“Professor Summers has announced that he will retire from his academic and faculty appointments at Harvard at the end of this academic year and will remain on leave until that time,” Mr. Newton said.
In a statement, Prof. Summers said it was a difficult decision and expressed gratitude to the students and colleagues he worked with over 50 years, including five as Harvard’s president.
“Free of formal responsibility, as President Emeritus and a retired professor, I look forward in time to engaging in research, analysis, and commentary on a range of global economic issues,” Prof. Summers said.
Former U.K. ambassador Peter Mandelson released after arrest over Epstein revelations
The Justice Department’s latest release has rippled through academia, uncovering Mr. Epstein’s ties to numerous researchers who sought his funding and his friendship even after he became a convicted sex offender. Prof. Summers’s resignation follows that of Dr. Richard Axel, a Nobel laureate, who on Tuesday announced he would step down as co-director of Columbia University’s Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute.
Prof. Summers served as treasury secretary under former president Bill Clinton and went on to lead Harvard for five years starting in 2001.
A trove of files released by the government cast new light on Prof. Summers’s relationship with Mr. Epstein, which spanned years and included visits to one another at their homes in Massachusetts and New York. The two traded e-mails on topics ranging from politics and the economy to women and romance.
Prof. Summers, who has been married for 20 years, consulted Mr. Epstein on a separate relationship with a woman he was tutoring in economics, according to e-mails from 2018 and 2019. Mr. Epstein described himself as Prof. Summers’s “wing man” and encouraged persistence. In a 2018 e-mail, Mr. Summers said the woman was never his student but he had “known her father for 20 plus years as Chinese economic official.”
“I have a very good life w Lisa kids etc.,” Prof. Summers said in a 2018 e-mail, referencing his wife. “Easy to put at risk for something that might not materialize at all or if it does might prove transient.”
In a 2016 e-mail, Prof. Summers appeared to use a slur for Asian people while discussing an upcoming meeting between Mr. Epstein and an official from a Chinese university.
Responding to previous revelations, Prof. Summers last year said he had “great regrets in my life” and that his association with Mr. Epstein was a “major error in judgment.”
Harvard officials have publicly said little about Prof. Summers’s relationship. When Prof. Summers went on leave last year, the university said it was reviewing “individuals at Harvard” who were in the Epstein documents “to evaluate what actions may be warranted.”
Mr. Epstein’s ties to Harvard were the focus of a 2020 campus report finding that the financier gave more than US$9-million to the Ivy League school, mostly for a centre founded by math and biology professor Martin Nowak. The report did not mention Prof. Summers’s relationship with Mr. Epstein. Prof. Nowak was later disciplined by Harvard.
In December, Prof. Summers was dealt a lifetime ban from the American Economic Association, a non-profit scholarly association dedicated to economic research, over his Epstein ties. He has also left the board of directors at OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.
At Columbia, Dr. Axel said in a statement Tuesday that he regretted his association with Mr. Epstein, calling it a “serious error in judgment.” He said he is also giving up his position as an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute but will continue to research and teach in his laboratory at the Zuckerman Institute in Manhattan.
Dr. Axel was one of the 2004 winners of the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for discoveries related to the human olfactory system. His name appears more than 600 times in Justice Department files reviewed by the Associated Press, including in e-mails he exchanged with Mr. Epstein and on schedules noting their meetings, dinners and lunches.
In a news article published in 2007, while Mr. Epstein was initially under investigation in Florida, the scientist praised Mr. Epstein’s intellect, telling New York magazine: “He has the ability to make connections that other minds can’t make. He is extremely smart and probing.”
The resignations are the latest fallout from the Justice Department’s recent release of millions of pages of records pertaining to Mr. Epstein and his long-time confidant and former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell. Resignations have rippled across the academic, legal and business communities.
In Britain, former prince Andrew and ex-diplomat Peter Mandelson were arrested because of their connections to Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell.