Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers will resign from teaching at Harvard University amid a campus review of his ties to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the university announced Wednesday.
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,” Newton said.
In a statement, Summers said it was a difficult decision and expressed gratitude to the students and colleagues he worked with over 50 years.
“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,” Summers said.
Summers served as treasury secretary under former President Bill Clinton and went on to lead Harvard as president for five years starting in 2001.
A trove of files released by the government cast new light on Summers’ relationship with Epstein, which spanned years and included visits to one another at their homes in Massachusetts and New York. The two traded emails on topics ranging from politics and the economy to women and romance.
Summers, who has been married for 20 years, consulted Epstein on a separate relationship with a woman he was tutoring in economics, according to emails from 2018 and 2019. Epstein described himself as Summers’ “wing man” and encouraged persistence. In a 2018 email, 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.,” Summers said in a 2018 email, 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 email, Summers appeared to use a slur for Asian people while discussing an upcoming meeting between Epstein and an official from a Chinese university.
Source: WPLG
