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.
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, 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,” Summers said.
The Justice Department’s latest release has rippled through academia, uncovering Epstein’s ties to numerous researchers who sought his funding and his friendship even after he became a convicted sex offender. Summers’ 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.
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 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.
Responding to previous revelations, Summers last year said he had “great regrets in my life” and that his association with Epstein was a “major error in judgement.”
Harvard officials have publicly said little about Summers’ relationship. When 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.”
Epstein’s ties to Harvard were the focus of a 2020 campus report finding that the financier gave more than $9 million to the Ivy League school, mostly for a center founded by math and biology professor Martin Nowak. The report did not mention Summers’ relationship with Epstein. Nowak was later disciplined by Harvard.
In December, Summers was dealt a lifetime ban from the American Economic Association, a nonprofit 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, Axel said in a statement Tuesday that he regretted his association with 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.
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 emails he exchanged with Epstein and on schedules noting their meetings, dinners and lunches.
In a news article published in 2007, while Epstein was initially under investigation in Florida, the scientist praised 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 Epstein and his longtime 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 Epstein and Maxwell.
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Associated Press Writer Michael Sisak in New York contributed to this report.
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