Tag: Harvard University

Lawrence H. Summers, the former Harvard president and one of the country’s most renowned economists, is facing the worst scandal of his career after newly released emails showed him seeking advice from Jeffrey Epstein on how to seduce a young economic mentee long after the notorious financier’s 2008 sex-crimes conviction. This isn’t Summers’s first time in the hot seat, as Richard Bradley knows all too well. The author detailed many of Summers’s past scandals, his subsequent comebacks, and his unlikely path to becoming Harvard’s leader in 2005’s Harvard Rules: The Struggle for the Soul of the World’s Most Powerful University. That book, with its account of Summers routinely butting heads with faculty and staff, largely predicted his resignation as president a short time later after public outrage over remarks denigrating women scientists. I asked Bradley to break down what the latest Epstein revelations tell us about Summers’s ascent to the top of academia and politics, his public fall, and whether or not this is really the reckoning that many think it is.

By this point you’ve probably seen the video of Summers opening his economics class at Harvard this week by acknowledging his “shame” over his correspondence with Epstein. Which has brought us to this sort of viral moment where Harvard students are noting that their esteemed professor is standing before the class and admitting he is “in the Epstein files.” It feels like an unthinkable moment for the university — how damning is this, reputation-wise, for both Summers and Harvard? 
Well, that’s the $64,000 question, because the answer to it probably determines whether Larry Summers can retain his status as a university professor or even a tenured professor at Harvard.

And it sounds like he is planning on staying?
Oh, it does. It certainly does. The fact that he obtained that position after he resigned as president of Harvard in 2006 was essential for him because it was a perfect position for him to rebuild his career and to rebuild his image. It’s not a position that requires a lot of work — Summers can teach a lecture course in his sleep. And I think the professional obligations of it, frankly, are not high.

It would stand to reason that it would also be the position from which he would try to launch a comeback again. The funny thing is that Larry Summers has been so damaging to the Harvard brand, not just in 2006 but earlier when he was criticizing the antisemitism that he saw on campus. It’s an unusual thing for a former university president to criticize the university, and typically not done, because implicitly it’s a criticism of the current president and it certainly makes the work of the current president trickier. And now again with his association with Jeffrey Epstein. And of course, it’s not the first time that association has gotten him in trouble, but it’s certainly on another level now.

The irony is that for someone who has always been so critical of Harvard, he needs Harvard. And so I think he will fight very hard not to lose that position. And it will be fascinating to see what Harvard does, because, you know, there are more emails to come. I expect that nobody knows. I imagine Summers doesn’t know what those emails might contain. Harvard certainly doesn’t.

I know he’s come back from so many scandals, from backlash during his time at the World Bank over a memo about dumping toxic waste in poor countries to apparently questioning women’s cognitive abilities while president of Harvard. There are critics out there kind of celebrating this and saying, “Yeah it’s about time.” Do you think this is overdue?
I don’t know that I see this as some kind of karmic justice. Look, there are a lot of people who think that Summers is a jerk. And a lot of times he is a jerk. It’s true. In my Politico piece, I went out of my way to include that anecdote about the Winklevoss twins, at the Aspen Institute, saying he called them assholes. Because it has bothered me for years, the idea that a former president of Harvard would make a joke about former students and call them assholes in a public forum. It’s like Trump calling someone “Piggy.” It’s not right.

That was another thing you mentioned in your Politico column. There are some similarities between Trump and Summers. Barring any intellectual comparisons, they’ve both weathered all these scandals and managed somehow to come back. 
They both appeal to a certain type of American constituency that is tired of nuance, tired of negotiations, tired of ambiguity. People who want a certain masculine, gendered masculine approach to clarity and “boldness,” and “vision.” There are people who like this style.

The fact is Trump and Summers possibly have some overlap in terms of their criticism of both Harvard and universities in general. Summers hates “woke” faculty; he hates left-wing students. This is not new. Summers is, of course, much more intellectual and learned, and smarter in many ways.

I don’t think this started for Summers with Jeffrey Epstein. I think he has always had this kind of boorish, vulgar, and sometimes sexist side of him.

I don’t want to try and get inside his head too much, but why do you think he did turn to Epstein, of all people, for these personal matters in the first place? You got into it a little bit in your book, this idea that he’s attracted to power. 
It’s celebrity. It’s a weird word to use in this context, but there are celebrities in the kinds of worlds that Larry Summers inhabits, and he’s one of them. He probably likes that more than he likes being professor, although I think he does enjoy teaching, and I think he values the field of economics and takes it very seriously. But if he took it really seriously, he wouldn’t have had the career that he’s had.

To go back to your question, I do think I agree with you — his mind is a complicated place. So it is difficult to figure it out, but I think there’s a couple things. There is this side which does not want to be a geek. He wants to be cool. And he definitely wants to be seen that way, to be leading a life where he kind of gets to do these things that are taboo and get away with it. I also think that Summers might have seen in Epstein another individual who had broken the rules, violated social norms, offended women — I know Epstein did more than that to women — and being marginalized, to some degree, as a result. And I think there might have been some sense of solidarity there. And I don’t mean to suggest that Summers was engaging in the behaviors that Epstein was — there’s no sign of that.

I think the most alarming thing about what he was saying to Epstein is that he described this woman as a mentee. How could he keep teaching at Harvard after that? 
I think that is really kind of a hard stop. You have Summers clearly articulating a relationship in which he seems to have no moral qualms with violating a standard of behavior that professors really do take incredibly seriously, even though some of them do occasionally violate it. So I don’t see how he gets back. I think something that has not gotten enough attention was the fact that Summers and Epstein referred to her as “peril.” I don’t know how you get over that, either. It’s gross.

Years after that scandal with the World Bank memo, he said he didn’t want to be seen as weak by telling people it was a member of his staff who’d written it, so he sort of fell on his sword. I do wonder if we’ll see the same thing here: He won’t want to be seen as weak and therefore won’t give up without a fight?
There’s not a chance that Larry Summers wants the first paragraph of his obituary to read that he was forced to resign from Harvard twice.

I think these two sides of Summers have always co-existed. I would say that there was always this quality of thinking that the rules didn’t really apply to him. He would try to comport with them when incumbent upon him.

I see some of his critics arguing that he was wrongly exalted and that he has been wrong on economic issues plenty of times that just never got as much attention. He was portrayed as uniquely brilliant, but is there a chance that wasn’t true?
When people say he’s brilliant or how smart he is, they never qualify that with any sense of in what way he’s smart, in what way he’s brilliant. Which is to say, I’ve seen Summers achieve two things: to be absorbing huge amounts of information, process it, come up with insightful conclusions about it, almost sometimes on the spot — it’s pretty impressive. On the other hand, that perception of his being exceptional is heightened by the kind of oddness of his presentation and the certitude of his manner. Summers never says, “This could be true, but it might not be true.” He says, “This is true.” That mixture of an unquestionably formidable mind with these personality quirks that sometimes in popular culture are associated with genius, with an unflinching certitude of personal correctness, gets woven into this big ball of “good.”

If you step back and say, Where has he been right, where has he been wrong? What are his big ideas, how much has he changed the field of economics? In what ways is he smart, in what ways is he really not smart at all? In what ways would you look at things he’s done and say, “That was kind of stupid”? Then the question of Summers’s brilliance becomes much more nuanced.

It’s the kind of brilliance that in a certain sector of the population is awarded primacy over other kinds of intelligence. For example, in the financial world, in certain parts of the university world, in the tech world, someone whose mind works like Summers’s does, which is kind of like a computer, is really valued and admired and respected regardless of personal failings. But if people had said, “Well, what about emotional intelligence, what about diplomatic intelligence, what about intuition,” they would look at you and say, “Why do those things matter?”

So it’s not a well-rounded intelligence; it’s a very specific and kind of narrow sort of intelligence.

I think that we have overlooked personal challenges and some of his intellectual mistakes because he walks into a room and we constantly award him that presumption of intelligence without really considering the nature and the limits of his particular kind of intelligence. So we’re looking at an incomplete data set and concluding that it’s brilliant.

What does that say about the politics of power today? 
I don’t think emotional intelligence is a particularly valued quality. The funny thing about this is that the kind of intelligence that Summers has, and that people like about him, is very much — and this is not my perception — a stereotypically male kind of intelligence. Like, “He’s an asshole, but he’s really smart.” And so when Summers talks about women’s kind of intelligence, to me the statement he’s making is, “It’s not my kind of intelligence.” He really is a product of an incredibly competitive, masculine-dominated academic gladiatorial arena.

Two of his uncles were Nobel laureates, as you mention in your book, and I wonder if in some way he’s tried to defy that expectation of him. 
One of my arguments in the book was that he’s realized that he was not as fine-minded and of the same caliber as his uncles. And also that maybe this wasn’t the life that he wanted to lead. One of the things I think really shaped him that people don’t talk about is the fact that he’s a cancer survivor. It was pretty serious, and he could’ve died. And he was young. So I think there’s a sense that he’s escaped his fate more than once: cancer, losing his presidency, scandal at the World Bank. He’s played with fire multiple times in his life. But I don’t think this one gets extinguished quite so easily.

Can you see him fading for a couple years and then making a comeback? 
There are people who would hire him. I’ve heard people make the argument, “Well, he didn’t commit any crimes — maybe he didn’t know the extent of Epstein’s behavior.” People inclined to like that sort of personality will find ways to whitewash this. I think the question is not whether he’ll be able to come back; it’s what that comeback will look like, and whether it will be satisfying for him, and whether Harvard has to be, psychologically, a part of that comeback. Because it still matters to him. As much as he criticizes Harvard, his relationship with the university and the prestige that it accords him still matters.

As in “yellow peril.”