Who is Larry Summers, ex-Harvard president under fire for Epstein ties?

Larry Summers has found himself embroiled in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

The famed economist, academic and former treasury secretary for then US president Bill Clinton has said he will take a step back from public life. This follows emails between Summers and the late, disgraced financier being released by Democrats and Republicans.

Summers has also said that he is ashamed of his ties to Epstein, which continued after the late financier had been convicted of soliciting a minor in Florida. However, he added that despite that “lapse of judgement”, he will continue to carry out his teaching duties at Harvard. Summers’ wife, Elisa New, is a Professor Emerita of American Literature at Harvard.

But who is Summers, the President Emeritus of Harvard and the Charles W Eliot University Professor? What do we know about him?

Early life, MIT and Harvard

Summers was born on 30 November 1954 in New Haven, Connecticut. His parents, Robert and Anita Summers, were economics professors at the University of Pennsylvania. Theirs was an accomplished and educated family. Summers had two uncles on either side of the family who were Nobel laureates.

Summers enrolled at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at age 16. Though he initially wanted to study maths and physics, he eventually changed his major to economics. After graduating from MIT with a Bachelor’s degree in 1975, Summers then went to Harvard University.

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He earned his PhD from Harvard in 1982. His thesis was on taxation of capital income. Summers then created history by becoming among the youngest ever tenured professors at Harvard at age 28.

Dive into politics, adviser to Democratic presidents

Though Summers maintained a prolific pace at Harvard and wrote a number of papers in addition to his teaching career, he decided to dive into politics.

Summers then joined Michael Dukakis’s doomed 1988 presidential campaign against George H. W. Bush. He was joined by Robert Reich, another economist and Harvard professor. In 1992, Summers left Harvard and joined the World Bank as its chief economist.

After Bill Clinton prevailed in the 1992 election, Summers was made Under Secretary of the US Treasury. Summers was later promoted to the role of US Treasury Secretary, a position he served in until the end of Clinton’s term in 2001.

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Summers then rejoined Harvard as its president, a role he would hold until 2006. However, his tenure came to an ignominious end after he suggested there were fewer women in academia because women were intrinsically unwilling to work as hard as men and put in “80 hours per week”.

Summers then returned to the Barack Obama White House as the financial crisis began to take hold across the world. In 2009, Obama appointed Summers to his National Economic Council.

Controversy over emails

The correspondence between Summers and Epstein occurred between 2013 and 2019.

“I observed that half the IQ in world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 per cent of population …” Summers wrote in one email. This comment seemingly disparages women and suggests that they are less intelligent than men.

Summers also seemingly insinuated that hitting on a woman should not damage one’s career. “I’m trying to figure why American elite think if u murder your baby by beating and abandonment it must be irrelevant to your admission to Harvard, but hit on a few women 10 years ago and can’t work at a network or think tank,” Summers wrote. “Do not repeat this insight,” he added.

Summers also seemingly traded emails with Epstein about his personal life and appeared to seek his advice over wooing an unnamed woman. Summers told Epstein the woman at one point told him “I’m busy” and he responded with “awfully coy u are”.

“Did u really rearrange the weekend we were going to be together because guy number 3 was coming,” he further asked. “I didn’t want to be in a gift-giving competition while being the friend without benefits,” Summers added. He said “she must be very confused or maybe wants to cut me off but wants professional connection a lot and so holds to it.”

Epstein responded that the woman was making Summers “pay for past errors” but “no whining showed strength.” Epstein, in one message written in November 2018, referred to himself as Summers’ “wing man”.

“Think no response for a while probably appropriate,” Summers wrote in one email. To which Epstein replied: “She’s already beginning to sound needy :) nice.”

Epstein, during Summers’ tenure as Harvard president, is reported to have donated millions of dollars to the institution.

Calls for Harvard to cut ties

Many people, including politician Elizabeth Warren, who has previously been at odds with Summers over financial regulations, have called on Harvard to sever ties with Summers in light of the emails.

“For decades, Larry Summers has demonstrated his attraction to serving the wealthy and well-connected, but his willingness to cosy up to a convicted sex offender demonstrates monumentally bad judgement,” Warren told CNN.

“If he had so little ability to distance himself from Jeffrey Epstein even after all that was publicly known about Epstein’s sex offences involving underage girls, then Summers cannot be trusted to advise our nation’s politicians, policymakers and institutions – or teach a generation of students at Harvard or anywhere else.”

The White House too is twisting the knife in Summers.

As an unnamed Trump White House source told Politico: “It’s shocking that Larry Summers remains a paid contributor to Bloomberg News, on the board of OpenAI and tenured at Harvard.”

“What more revelations about him and his ‘wing man’ will it take for institutions to cut him loose? The British government immediately sacked their ambassador to the US over much less.”

With inputs from agencies