Eliot University Professor Lawrence H. Summers, under fire for his connections to convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, will retire at the end of the academic year, a Harvard spokesperson announced on Wednesday. Summers has also resigned from his position as co-director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School.
“I have made the difficult decision to retire from my Harvard professorship at the end of this academic year,” Summers said in a statement. “I will always be 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.”
Summers served as the president of Harvard from 2001 until his dramatic resignation in 2006, after months of clashes with members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. From 1999 to 2001, he was the U.S. secretary of the treasury under President Bill Clinton’s administration.
In November, the University announced that it would be reviewing previously undisclosed Epstein links to Harvard affiliates, Summers among them. A partial release of emails by a House of Representatives Committee at that time had revealed that Summers remained in contact with Epstein for more than a decade after his 2008 conviction. The pair exchanged texts and emails up until 2019, when Epstein was arrested for a second time on federal human trafficking charges—discussing subjects that ranged from politics to fundraising for Summers’s wife’s poetry program to Summers’s pursuit of a relationship with an unnamed woman described as his mentee. Summers announced, shortly after the release of those emails, that he would be taking a leave from his teaching duties.
In a statement on Wednesday, a Harvard spokesperson wrote that “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’s resignation from his leadership position as co-director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government.”
In addition, the spokesperson continued, “Professor Summers has announced that he will retire from his academic and faculty appointments at Harvard at the end of this academic year and will remain on leave until that time.”
According to a University source, Summers will not be teaching or taking on new advisees during the interim.
In his statement, Summers suggested that, though he is shedding his Harvard affiliation, he will not be departing from public life. “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,” he said.
Harvard published an official report into Epstein’s history as a University donor in 2020. Unspent gifts from him, totaling more than $200,000, were donated to organizations that support victims of human trafficking and sexual assault. But there was no mention in that report of Epstein’s apparent role in soliciting a donation sometime in 2014 or 2015 for a poetry project helmed by Summers’s wife, Cabot professor of American literature emerita Elisa New.
Summers apologized when the emails revealing this continued financial and personal relationship became public, writing, “[I am] deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused. I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein.”
A University spokesperson also confirmed on Wednesday that professor of mathematics and biology Martin Nowak has been placed on paid administrative leave pending further investigation by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). Nowak had been sanctioned by FAS in 2021 for maintaining ties to Epstein after his 2008 conviction for child prostitution, though the sanction was lifted in 2023.
