Both took/are taking far too long. Elites protect their own until absolutely pushed to the wall. Remember how lovingly Oxford clung to Tariq Ramadan! Remember Yale’s Michael Simons. Remember Robert “Two Chairs” Alpern.
[T]he connection between Summers and Epstein has long been public knowledge. Summers joined OpenAI in November of 2023, almost four years after the New York Times published a photo of him hanging out with Epstein at the sex trafficker’s Manhattan mansion, and six months after the world learned that Summers had solicited donations from Epstein on behalf of his wife’s poetry foundation. Undeterred, the Times itself hired Summers as a contributor to its Opinion section at the beginning of 2025... Prestigious institutions knew exactly who Summers was, and sought him out anyway, for years... [It all] reveals an American elite blinded to outrages occurring in plain view, due to the clubby nature of high society. All the way back in 2009, Summers offered some unsolicited advice to not yet-Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) about surviving in Washington. “Outsiders can say whatever they want,” he counseled, “but insiders don’t criticize other insiders.” As an empirical observation, Summers was right—the world does work that way, illustrated most grotesquely in the Epstein debacle.
Harvard continues to affiliate itself not only with Summers, but with his buddy, Mister Female Genital Mutilation himself, Alan Dershowitz.
November 19th, 2025 at 8:49PM
What would be the grounds for firing Summers? For associating with a felon? For being icky?
November 20th, 2025 at 12:00AM
For moral turpitude. Dude was president of the school – highest profile, most trusted position, which calls for high levels of moral probity, since the reputation of the institution is at stake. I happen to find his irresponsible, self-serving, Harvard-damaging financial actions (losing over a billion endowment dollars, taking a position at a hedge fund while still president, defending/protecting crony A. Shleifer) more serious than his – call them depraved-adjacent – Epstein issues. But anyone who has followed this very odd person’s personal greed/sexual juvenility over many years has to wonder how anyone ever thought it was a good idea to appoint him Harvard’s president.
November 20th, 2025 at 8:29AM
That would make sense if he were currently the president, but he resigned that office more than 20 years ago. Should moral turpitude, or probably more like pretextual revenge at this point, be grounds for being fired from the faculty? Glenn Loury at Brown published a memoir last year in which he admits to a great number of morally, err, turpitudinal acts undertaken while a professor, including snorting cocaine off a hooker’s backside. Should he be fired? Other moral turps? Should professors found in communication with felons or ex-felons generally be fired? Is there any generalizable principle here beyond a mob calling for his head?
November 20th, 2025 at 8:52AM
Like Dershowitz (who Harvard should also dump), Summers remains an extremely high-profile, actively teaching (until yesterday; but he plans to come back), member of the Harvard faculty. That he was prez is less important than that he is an ongoing moral disgrace and an embarrassment to the institution on a remarkable number of fronts. He and his Harv prof wife weren’t just in communication with Epstein; they took money for Harvard projects from him.
Think of how hard it was for so many elite institutions to take back Bill Cosby’s honorary degrees. All eventually did, but many really balked at the idea of dissing a rich successful insider who might give their school a ton of money.
The generalizable principle is that institutions have a right to defend their reputations against people who damage their reputations. They don’t have to. Liberty U held onto Falwell’s boy for a very long time. GWU’s prez at the time fulminated against the outrage of denying Cosby his honor. But most universities can be made to understand that their standing in the world – their non-profit status at the very least (Harvard non-profit! LOL – but see that’s the problem right there and it’s why right after Summers they desperately grabbed onto preachy anti-materialist female Drew Faust for prez…), depends on their being perceived as committed to the public good over amoral elitist power and greed. Summers happens to be a poster boy for the latter, and every day he flaunts his Harvard connection (just as every day Andrew M-W flaunted his royal connection) is a day Harvard sinks in public estimation.
November 20th, 2025 at 9:16AM
So is that a yes on firing Loury? Or is reputational damage determined only by whether there is a formed mob angry enough to demand someone’s head, in which case the head should be given, because mob anger = bad reputation? So when state gov’ts or the federal gov’t requests the firing of lefty kooks who study things like the “autoethnography of fatness” and exhort their students to “fat liberation,” that should be done as well, b/c they surely represent a constituency whose judgments affect an institution’s reputation?
It seems that we have quite recently gone through a national hysterical paroxysm of such reputational concern, when it became paramount for universities to do anything and everything to avoid being perceived as racist, including firing anyone whom anyone accused of being racist, down to a UCLA professor teaching Chinese who spoke out loud a perfectly normal Chinese word that sounded vaguely like the n-word in English. That all went very well, I think! Many good outcomes from that noble reputation-saving effort, including the re-election of Trump, the freezing of all their research funds, etc. The lesson of those years is definitely that we should do more of this.
November 20th, 2025 at 10:36AM
I hear you, Rita. Vague concepts like reputation are rife w/ the possibility of abuse, from left, right, and center. But surely there are justified invocations of it on occasion; and these I think would involve, for instance, severe ongoing institutional damage from powerful high-profile people who have been bad actors on plural fronts (financial, criminal, legal, scholarly, ethical). Do you object to Harvard’s having fired tenured biz professor F. Gino, who plagiarized much of her work, and committed research fraud, for which Harvard was paying her a million dollars a year? What about the (less powerful) Florida professor who publicly insisted the Sandy Hook massacre was a false flag operation, and urged that the parents be exposed for the fakers they were? Are there any grounds, as you see it, for dumping a professor?