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?
November 20th, 2025 at 1:34PM
Integrity is where you find it. Bill Cosby performed at the opening of Northern Illinois’s basketball area, er, convocation center. Got an honorary degree, subsequently revoked (how long it took, I don’t know.) J. Dennis Hastert did a masters I think in history there, wrote a land purchase into an early 21st century infrastructure bill, got an honorary degree, subsequently revoked (I think relatively quickly). A lot of that land is still vacant. Earlier, the university did remove an older econ legacy for cause (ineffective teaching.) Whether anybody ever ran afoul of a hearing panel for fishing off the company pier (which that Crimson article hints at) I don’t know.
The policy side of Harvard’s failures (take your pick where to start) being part of their becoming an object of disrespect are for another day.
November 20th, 2025 at 5:37PM
Certainly research fraud and plagiarism, which undermine the basic purpose of universities, violating the university’s policies (eg, sexual harassment and also research fraud), and violating criminal laws are plausible grounds for termination. Revoking honorary degrees is another matter, by definition entirely discretionary since there are no rules governing receiving one. And administrators work at the pleasure of the university board or whoever is ostensibly in charge, so there is more leeway in pushing them out for purely reputational concerns.
But termination of faculty has to be governed by some generalizable principles, and not an amorphous concern about public opinion. Conspiracy theorists are difficult because the lines between dangerous conspiracy theory, whacky but harmless conspiracy theory, and simply eccentric opinion are hard to draw. I would tend to err against firing conspirators generally, even probably offensive ones like Sandy Hook was a false flag or that Oberlin woman years ago who believed Jews ran the world economy or whatever. Maybe you warn these guys to stick to their fields (in which case, Yale astronomer who believes in UFOs would just keep talking about them but oh well) and then you take action only if they don’t. But these are edge cases, and I’m open to persuasion on them.
Summers seems more clear-cut. He may be a terrible person, but I don’t see how he violated any law or university policy that merits firing him. If we follow some principle that friendliness with felons is a fireable offense, there go your university prison education programs. (Which I, at least, would not miss.) If sex with underage girls is the specific issue, and it’s such a depraved crime that even the friends of the offenders must come in for punishment, I just don’t buy that as a principle anyone saying this actually believes or would extend to anyone else. The NYT just ran an entire feature a couple weeks ago on a single street in LA where dozens of underage girls get trafficked every night, and did not bother to identify a single John, no less his friends. None of these are plausible reasons for faculty termination and all of them, if generalized, seem to send us right back to the moral panic of 2020.
November 20th, 2025 at 7:38PM
I suspect Summers has proven particularly vulnerable not because of mob mentality or revenge, as you suggest. He has a particularly long and rich history of bad deeds – financial irresponsibility while prez, personal greed while prez, the defense of a faculty crony’s fraud against the federal govt while prez, sexist statements that recur post-prez w/ Epstein, close fraternization with a notorious sex trafficker, etc. There is a cumulative, shocking power of misdeed here that’s unusual. His having been the leader of America’s preeminent university — a massively significant, massively high-profile position — gives his misbehavior and terrible moral judgment far more weight.
And look – I don’t care if like generations of ill-featured men he tried his hand at using his stature and pull to bed beautiful women. Behind his wife’s back. Shades of his French twin Dom! But it’s yet one more thing. It’s just another facet of a shocking degree of, yes, I’d call it turpitude. So I don’t see moral panic. I do see moral disgust.
November 20th, 2025 at 9:20PM
Again, the things that happen “while prez” might merit removal “from prez,” but that is a moot point now. Or, it’s just that you wanted to punish him for those things 20 yrs ago but that never happened, so you’ll accept any pretext now. Problem is, the pretext becomes the principle. And the principle merits firing probably quite large numbers of the adulterers, sayers of outre things in emails, and fraternizers with baddies who make up the ranks of academics (and all other professions).
The moral panickers of 2020 also saw themselves as merely morally disgusted. “How hard is it not to be a racist? Just don’t be racist!” Duh! The obsession with pedophiles on the right is also framed as moral disgust. Who is not disgusted by pedophilia, after all? And as it happens, pedophilia is actually everywhere…in that pizza parlor in DC a few years ago, the secret fetish of high-ranking Dem lizard-people, ritual practice of Jews, and obviously by anyone who is friends with one. And it is all very morally disgusting.
I think the difference between the Epstein panic and the George Floyd Derangement of 2020 is mostly that punishing Epstein’s friends has cross-partisan political appeal – the right’s obsession with pedophilia meets the left’s hated “rich elites.” Everyone is tickled in the deepest recesses of their resentments. But is the substantive thing being done different? I don’t see how.
November 21st, 2025 at 10:04AM
I don’t think the George Floyd situation is the right analogy here. (And I see nothing deranged about the rage unleashed by the sight of a police officer casually snuffing out a man’s life, particularly given the historically fraught relationship between the police and Black males.) The better analogy would be to the very organized and much more recent effort to destroy the careers of anyone who so much as criticized Charlie Kirk after his death. To be sure, some of the comments that were made were disgusting and others were deeply distasteful. I wouldn’t want to be friends with anyone who would celebrate the cold-blooded murder of another human being. Nevertheless, all of these things are clearly protected by the First Amendment (so long as they are said on private time and unassociated with the speaker’s employment), so the public universities that fired these individuals not only sinned against the Constitution, but also created a truly chilling precedent.
So where does that leave us with Summers? Well, we already kinda knew he was a sexist and now I suppose we have to add racist to the mix (code-naming the Asian woman he was chasing as “Peril”). There is, I believe, something to say for the notion that even private racists and sexists are not fit to educate college students, but if we set the bar at the level of Summers’ texts, we’d probably sweep up a lot more people than we’d want to (and, again, it would be hard to square such a policy with the First Amendment). Summers’s choice of friends is atrocious, but there seems to be no evidence that he participated in or even cheered on any of Epstein’s crimes. Summers is, in short, a dirtbag. But I’m not sure I’m quite ready to make dirtbaggery, even at this high level, a firing offense.
November 22nd, 2025 at 5:30AM
TAKFAU, Rita: You convince me that Harvard outright firing (or legally decoupling from) Summers is a bad idea (do you think all those other places, including the NYT, that have dumped him acted badly?). Taking away his emeritus status and issuing a condemnatory statement might, for instance, be a reasonable way to go.
But I don’t agree that a particular community wanting to have nothing to do with a powerful, high level, highly compensated dirtbag is the same as moral panic/mob justice. I don’t think it’s automatically subject to abuse/infectious unfairness. I think boycotts of dirtbag courses (making it impossible for such people to show up and teach them) are fine, and I think that in very ugly cases, like Amy Wax at Penn, universities should not fire but should denounce them every time they say/do something morally unacceptable.
It is always possible that subsequent Epstein revelations will show or strongly suggest that Summers engaged in sex w. underage girls, as ex-Prince Andrew seems to have done. If that happens, off he goes.
November 24th, 2025 at 10:30PM
Sure, I don’t propose to protect the jobs of felons.
Students can also just choose not to take the guy’s classes, which is a freedom they always have with respect to any professor. But has he disqualified himself from teaching economics at Harvard? Not based on anything that has come out so far. And I don’t think that, as a rule, we want the “community” of students to determine who gets a faculty position. They can do that at Deep Springs.
Should the NYT have fired him? On the whole, I think an important lesson America should learn from the last 5-10 yrs is to do a lot less ideological firing or firing bc “X’s beliefs make me feel unsafe” etc. If someone’s main crime is associating with bad dudes and saying mean/controversial things, but not committing any crime or policy violation, I would lean against firing. But non-university organizations may have legitimate business purposes that keeping loathsome people around will disrupt. Whatever the NYT does though, it is not bound by a commitment to academic freedom, whereas the university has to hold itself to a higher standard on this front.