Ex-Harvard President Resigns Over Close Relationship With Jeffrey Epstein
Former Harvard President Larry Summers has resigned from his professorship over his widely publicized relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Summers has tendered his resignation and will take a leave of absence for the remainder of the academic year, relinquishing all of his university duties afterward, a Harvard spokesperson confirmed to the Daily Caller News Foundation. The former university president and treasury secretary in the Clinton administration also confirmed his resignation in a statement to the Harvard Crimson on Wednesday.
Emails released by Congress show that Summers remained in close contact with Epstein even after his guilty plea to solicitation charges in 2008, and even until his arrest in 2019. Summers co-directs Harvard’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, but had already stepped away from teaching after students released a video of him apologizing for his relationship with Epstein, calling it “misguided.” (RELATED: Harvard Seeks Way to Silence Students Who Recorded Larry Summers’ Epstein Apology)
“Free from formal responsibility, as president emeritus and retired professor, I look forward to engaging in research, analysis, and commentary on a range of global economic issues,” Summers told the Harvard Crimson, adding that the decision to resign was “difficult,” but he was “grateful to the thousands of students and colleagues with whom I have had the privilege to teach and work since arriving at Harvard as a graduate student years ago 50 years.”
Former Treasury Secretary and current Harvard professor Larry Summers speaks at the annual spring meetings of the IMF and World Bank, April 13, 2016, in Washington, DC. (Mike Theiler/AFP via Getty Images)
“As part of the University’s ongoing review of documents relating to Jeffrey Epstein that were recently released by the government, Harvard Kennedy School Dean Jeremy Weinstein has accepted the resignation of Professor Lawrence H. Summers from his leadership position as co-director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government,” Jason Newton, Harvard’s director of media relations and communications, told DCNF.
In addition to stepping down from all academic and faculty positions at the university, Summers will not teach or accept new advisors, DCNF has learned.
Epstein allegedly used Harvard and other prominent universities to whitewash his sex crimes by ensuring that web pages detailing his academic donations included links to his 2008 conviction in Google searches for his name. The disgraced so-called philanthropist helped fund a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) lab that toyed with the idea of using “child-sized sex robots” to treat pedophiles and downplayed the severity of child sex crimes.
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