Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary and former president of Harvard, will resign from his teaching roles at the Ivy League university at the end of this academic year. He will also surrender his University Professorship title, Harvard confirmed on Wednesday.
Summers did not give a reason for his departure. Harvard did.
Spokesman Jason Newton told the Daily Mail the decision came "in connection with the ongoing review by the University of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein that were recently released by the government." Harvard Kennedy School Dean Jeremy Weinstein accepted the resignation. Summers will remain on leave, as he has been since November, and will not teach any classes or take on new advisees before his exit takes effect.
The resignation caps a rapid institutional collapse for one of the Democratic Party's most credentialed economic minds. Since November, Summers has also resigned from the OpenAI board. In December, the American Economic Association banned him for life. Now, Harvard, the institution where he spent 50 years as a student, professor, and president, has let him walk away quietly rather than answer for what the documents reveal.
Summers has been under intense scrutiny after a litany of documents released in DOJ files and by the House Oversight Committee exposed the depth of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender who pleaded guilty to procuring a child for prostitution in 2008.
According to the Daily Mail, the relationship was not a passing acquaintance. Summers corresponded with Epstein up until his final arrest in July 2019. Emails released by House lawmakers show Summers asked Epstein for advice on "getting horizontal" with a woman he had once described as a mentee. Epstein cracked that he was a "pretty good wing man." Summers, in one exchange, wrote:
I dint [sic] want to be in a gift giving competition while being the friend without benefits.
One day before federal authorities took Epstein into custody at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, Summers messaged the financier to share that he was in Cape Cod with family. The two men were in regular contact right up to the moment the law caught up with one of them.
Among the most damaging revelations: Summers and his wife, Lisa New, visited Epstein's Little Saint James island in December 2005, just ten days after their wedding. This was six months after Palm Beach police had begun investigating Epstein over the alleged rape of a 14-year-old girl.
A spokesperson for Summers attempted to soften the timeline:
Mr. Summers and Ms. New spent their honeymoon in St. John and Jamaica in December 2005, which was long before Mr. Epstein was arrested for the first time.
The spokesperson added that the couple "made a brief visit of less than a day to Mr. Epstein's island." Long before his arrest, perhaps. But not before police were already investigating Epstein for crimes against a child. That distinction matters, even if the spokesperson would rather you didn't notice it.
Summers' wife also emailed back and forth with Epstein. She recommended to him a book "about a man whose whole life is stamped forever by his impression of a young girl." The source material does not elaborate on the context of that recommendation. It doesn't need to.
The released files paint a broader picture of Epstein's social orbit, one that included some of the most powerful figures in American life. Among those pictured with Summers and Epstein:
Summers also dined with Epstein and Alan Dershowitz in 2004 at Harvard. An undated photo released by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee shows Summers, his wife, Elisa New, and Woody Allen on an airplane together.
None of this is circumstantial in isolation. Together, it forms the portrait of a man who moved comfortably through Epstein's world for years, maintained the relationship through a guilty plea for crimes against a child, and kept corresponding until the week of the final arrest.
In November, Summers offered his public reckoning. He called the situation "difficult" and said he was "grateful to the thousands of students and colleagues I have been privileged to teach and work with since coming to Harvard as a graduate student 50 years ago." He also said:
I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein.
"Misguided decision" is doing extraordinary work in that sentence. Summers did not accidentally reply to a stray email. He maintained a personal friendship with a man who had already pleaded guilty to procuring a child for prostitution. He sought relationship advice from him. He visited his island. He kept texting him until the FBI showed up.
The word for that is not "misguided." It is a choice, made repeatedly, over more than a decade.
Harvard's handling of this tells its own story. The university allowed Summers to remain on leave rather than face any formal proceeding. The dean "accepted" his resignation. The spokesman's statement was careful, clinical, and tied only to the "ongoing review" of documents. No moral judgment. No institutional reckoning. Just a quiet exit and a clean break.
This is the same Harvard that spent years lecturing the country on ethics, equity, and institutional responsibility. When one of its own most prominent figures turns out to have spent his honeymoon visiting a man under investigation for child sex crimes, the institution's response is a press statement and a handshake.
Summers worked for Bill Clinton's administration as Treasury Secretary. He ran Harvard. He sat on the board of one of the most consequential AI companies in the world. At every level of American power, he was welcomed, protected, and elevated. The Epstein documents didn't reveal a secret. They confirmed what the people around Summers apparently already knew and chose not to care about.
He described the situation, in a message, as a "bit of an Ibsen play." In Ibsen, the catastrophe always comes from the thing everyone agreed to ignore.
Summers is walking away from Harvard. The question no one at that institution seems willing to ask is why he was still there in the first place.
