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Saturday, February 25, 2006

A slightly obnoxious tone in this article…

…but the content seems right enough. It’s a list, in the New York Times, of mistakes President Summers made at Harvard. Here, for instance, is the Shleifer mistake:


Troublesome friends may need to be sacrificed. Many professors were troubled by a lawsuit involving Andrei Shleifer, an economics professor at Harvard, which alleged that he and an associate violated the terms of a federal contract involving a university program. Harvard settled the lawsuit for $26.5 million.

At a faculty meeting, Mr. Summers said he did not know enough to comment. This struck many as a disingenuous. The two men are good friends. And Mr. Summers was also seen as protective of Mr. Shleifer, once telling a dean not to allow another university to poach the economist, according to a deposition in the lawsuit.

The Harvard president might have helped himself if he had nudged his friend to go to New York University, which made a lucrative, ultimately unsuccessful bid to steal Mr. Shleifer in 2003.



Had Summers tried this, though, he’d have enraged the entire economics faculty, which loves Shleifer truly madly deeply.