Former Harvard president Larry Summers is resigning from his professorship over his widely reported relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Summers issued his resignation and will take leave through the rest of the academic year, relinquishing all duties from the university afterwards, a Harvard spokesman confirmed to the Daily Caller News Foundation. The former university president and Clinton administration Treasury Secretary also confirmed the resignation in a statement to The Harvard Crimson on Wednesday.
Emails released by Congress show Summers remained in close contact with Epstein even after his 2008 guilty plea for solicitation, and even until his 2019 arrest. Summers co-directs Harvard’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, but had already stepped back from teaching after students circulated a video of him apologizing for his relationship with Epstein, saying it was “misguided.”
“Free of formal responsibility, as President Emeritus and a retired professor, I look forward in time to engaging in research, analysis, and commentary on a range of global economic issues,” Summers told The Harvard Crimson, adding that the decision to resign was “difficult” but 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.”
“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 has accepted Professor Lawrence H. Summers’ resignation from his leadership position as co-director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government,” Jason Newton, director of Harvard’s media relations and communications, told the DCNF.
Along with retiring from all academic and faculty appointments at the university, Summers will also not teach or take on any new advisees, the DCNF has learned.
Epstein reportedly used Harvard and other prominent universities to whitewash his sexual crimes by ensuring webpages detailing his university donations flooded out links to his 2008 conviction in Google searches of his name. The disgraced so-called philanthropist helped fund a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) lab that toyed with the idea of using “child-size sex robots” to treat pedophiles and downplayed the severity of child sex crimes.
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