Some Harvard watchers attribute [Shleifer's non-punishment] to Dr. Summers's influence, though he formally recused himself from the matter, and they see the entire affair, assiduously detailed by Mr. McClintick [in the Institutional Investor article], as an indelible stain on Harvard's reputation.

..."One reason I was drawn to it was you had this very small group of exceptionally brilliant people, very young people, basically trying to save Russia and then an even smaller group corrupting the enterprise," [McClintick] said. "The wheeling and dealing and the internal dynamics of the group are fascinating."

...There is a wide range of opinion in the powerful circle of Harvard watchers on just how significant Mr. McClintick's article was in galvanizing faculty members. Richard Bradley, the author of "Harvard Rules: Lawrence Summers and the Battle for the World's Most Powerful University," has written frequently about the scandal on his blog (richardbradley.net).

"Suddenly, you couldn't just say this was an arcane legal dispute in which one party had somehow fallen afoul of the law," Mr. Bradley said in an interview. "Suddenly, this was exposed as a really unattractive and deliberate pattern of behavior and cover-up that quite dramatically pointed an arrow at Larry Summers."

...Dr. Summers' recusal, said Robert D. Putnam, a former dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, was a turning point.

"When the president responded in a manifestly untruthful way to questions that were asked about the Shleifer case," Mr. Putnam said, "it had a devastating effect on the views of people who were to that point uncommitted, people who, like me, were strong supporters of his agenda."

Others, however, maintain that the events detailed by Mr. McClintick were a negligible factor in Dr. Summers's departure. The report is available at institutionalinvestor.com.

"I would bet you there weren't more than 20 or 30 people who read it," said Alan M. Dershowitz, who has taught law at Harvard for 42 years and who wrote an op-ed about the resignation for The Boston Globe.

"It seems to me it was full of leaps of logic," Mr. Dershowitz said. "Once people made up their minds they wanted to get rid of Summers, they were dragging up anything."

...Michael J. Carroll, the editor at Institutional Investor who first approached Mr. McClintick with the story, said Mr. McClintick's article, the longest published in the magazine since he began editing it in 1999, warranted close attention. "Russia was going to go the way of the West, so in come the best and brightest of Harvard, and this story shows how the best and the brightest started to do things the old Russia way," Mr. Carroll said. Mr. McClintick concurred. "If this case shows anything," he said, "it's that intelligence does not equal wisdom."