A towering figure on the international stage, Lawrence H. Summers has used his deep knowledge of economics to quell business distress at home and abroad, lift barriers to a Harvard education for low-income students, and ease the pain of the Great Recession through government spending, even as some critics say his policies helped trigger the crisis.
Yet Summers’ contributions have frequently battled for attention with his abrasive style, displays of arrogance, and embrace of the spotlight.
It cost him the presidency at Harvard University nearly 20 years ago, but he remained prized for his intellect, influence, and authority. Summers held a prominent role in the Obama administration, has served on top corporate boards, and kept teaching at Harvard, where his 70th birthday last year was celebrated with an economic policy conference.
“Larry Summers is one of the great economic policymakers and commentators of the past four decades,” N. Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard economics professor, said in an email Saturday. “While I do not share all of his views, I have no doubt that the world is a better place for his involvement in setting the nation’s economic agenda.”
Summers’ resilience to controversies that would have leveled most others is now facing its biggest test with the release this month of his email correspondence with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, which has led Summers to step back from teaching at Harvard and other roles.
The emails show Summers was in touch with Epstein after the latter was convicted in 2008 for a prostitution crime involving a minor.
In 2018, Summers acknowledged fresh scrutiny of Epstein’s role in sex crimes involving minors and sought his advice on courting a younger woman for whom he used the alias “peril.” (Summers has been married since 2005.)
Summers did not respond to the Globe’s requests for comment. Last week, he acknowledged the severity of the latest revelations in a statement: “I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused.”
For some who have followed Summers’ career, the latest turn represents what could be a terminal exhaustion of the goodwill and influence his career contributions built.
“He has infuriated all the best people in all the most overt ways but had the benefits of social capital such that it took a really long time for him to ever be held accountable,” said Jeff Hauser, director of the Revolving Door Project, a government watch group.
Born in New Haven in 1954 to two economists, Summers rose to prominence in the familial trade and entered elite circles where he’s conducted his professional career. He became a tenured Harvard professor in 1983 at 28 after earning his PhD there, one of the youngest faculty members ever granted tenure.
Summers’ profile quickly climbed. As a member of the Clinton administration who rose to Treasury secretary, he marshalled the international response to currency crises in Mexico, East Asia, and Russia, and served on the economic team that presided over US government surpluses for several years ending in 2001.
In 1999, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine with his mentor Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, for a story headlined: “The Committee to Save the World.”
Rubin later helped convince Harvard’s presidential search committee to select Summers as president in 2001.
Negative headlines appeared soon after Summers took the helm, beginning with a public rift with several prominent Black scholars.
One professor, Cornel West, said Summers questioned his scholarship and criticized him for recording a rap CD. He and a colleague decamped for Princeton University. (West, now on the faculty at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
Despite a rocky start, Summers developed a following among many students. He advanced plans for Harvard’s expansion in Allston, pushed to improve the undergraduate curriculum, invested in life sciences research, and took steps to make the school more affordable for low-income students.
Yet many faculty revolted under Summers’ abrasive style.
“His arrogance is legendary. His spirit of vengeance is expansive and his toxic mendacity is well known and he governed that way as president of Harvard,” Timothy Patrick McCarthy, who teaches at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and the Kennedy School, said. “People were very unhappy with the way that he led.”
Epstein’s relationship with Harvard kicked into high gear during Summers’ presidency.
While the disgraced financier first donated to Harvard in 1998, his first major gift came in 2003, when he gave $6.5 million to help found the Program in Evolutionary Dynamics, approved by Summers. Summers and Epstein were friends at the time, The Harvard Crimson, a student newspaper, reported.
In 2005, Summers set off a global controversy after he speculated at an economics conference that innate differences between the sexes might be a reason why women trail male peers in math and science.
Two months later, a majority of Faculty of Arts and Sciences members voted it had no confidence in Summers.
Facing the possibility of a second vote, Summers resigned in February 2006, at the time the briefest tenure for a Harvard president since the Civil War.
While Summers was on his way out, Harvard announced he would become a university professor (the highest-ranking professorship), take a yearlong sabbatical, and then resume teaching.
When Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, Summers returned to government, becoming director of the National Economic Council.
At the White House, Summers confronted a historic economic crisis that some critics say he had helped to create years earlier, by advocating for deregulation, encouraging Clinton to repeal banking regulations in the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, and suggesting a hands-off approach to financial derivatives.
Summers helped to craft a response that poured billions into the economy with spending on infrastructure, health care, education, and tax cuts. The 2009 stimulus package was credited with saving jobs and promoting growth, though some economists criticized it for not going far enough (and Republicans opposed it for other reasons).
Later, in 2013, Obama briefly considered Summers for the head of the Federal Reserve, but Summers withdrew his name from consideration as some Senate Democrats signaled they opposed his confirmation, in part because of his stance on deregulation.
Jason Furman, a Harvard professor who worked with Summers during the Obama administration, said Summers pushed the White House in 2009 to proceed with the Affordable Care Act despite calls for retreat from some advisers.
“His academic ideas and policy advocacy have not conformed to the crude caricature painted by his critics but instead have been heterodox and more often than not pushed for a more vigorous role for government,” he said in an email.
After the Obama years, Joe Biden tapped Summers to advise his 2020 presidential campaign, drawing backlash from progressives because of Summers’ policies and controversial statements.
About two weeks after Biden’s inauguration, Summers published a prescient opinion piece in The Washington Post, predicting the administration’s $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package would trigger high inflation, an issue that plagued Democrats during last year’s election.
Democratic party observers say Summers’ regularly bashing of the Biden administration’s economic policies further eroded support for him.
“If you work in Democratic politics in Washington, D.C., running into people who dislike Summers on a personal basis is not difficult,” said Hauser, who opposed Summers’ Fed nomination when he worked for the AFL-CIO. “Once your status is in question, people have long memories.”
Summers remained in the public eye as a vocal pundit, commenting on both US financial policy and on Harvard, often criticizing his successors.
“Before Donald Trump, there was no bigger critic of Harvard than Larry Summers,” said Richard Bradley, who wrote the book “Harvard Rules” about Summers’ presidency.
In doing so, Summers stood apart from other former Harvard presidents, who rarely speak to the press.
Above all, Summers has been outspoken about Harvard’s response to antisemitism on campus. That escalated after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and Summers criticized then-president Claudine Gay’s initial response but later supported her leadership.
Ruth Wisse, an emerita professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard and another critic of the university’s handling of campus antisemitism, said Summers is “one of the finest people who ever served” the school.
He is “the only one who might have turned the university back to its rightful purpose,” she said in an email last week.
Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard economics professor, described Summers’ role in fighting antisemitism on campus as “courageous” while writing that his correspondence with Epstein is “deeply problematic.”
Summers has paired his criticism of antisemitism at Harvard with a vigorous defense of the institution against efforts by President Trump to tighten control over campus affairs.
In April, he wrote a guest essay in The New York Times accusing the Trump administration of “extortion” for its threats to strip federal funding at elite universities. He praised the school for resisting Trump’s demands for sweeping changes.
After congressional Republicans released thousands of Epstein’s emails on Nov. 12, The Crimson was first to report that Summers had sought his advice on courting a woman he described as a mentee.
While Summers’ ties to Epstein were previously known, the newly released emails revealed a deep rapport that continued after Epstein’s 2008 conviction and after a 2018 Miami Herald investigation renewed concerns about the handling of the earlier prosecution.
In one email, Summers appeared to reference the Herald’s reporting.
“U have returned to the press,” Summers emailed Epstein the day after the Herald published its first installment of the series. He then pivoted to discussing the prospective affair, with Epstein at one point replying: “im a pretty good wing man, no?”
Epstein and Summers stayed in touch until the day before Epstein was arrested in New York in July 2019, their emails show. (Epstein died in prison in August 2019.)
Bradley said this moment is different for Summers compared with his past public controversies.
“How you can have on your faculty someone who is knowingly corresponding and hanging out with a child molester?” he said.
Lawrence Kotlikoff, a Boston University economics professor who co-authored papers with Summers, said his comments about women and his association with Epstein disqualify him as a professor. Kotlikoff last week wrote a Substack post calling on Harvard to part ways with Summers, describing him as “the smartest guy in the room, but his ego always trumped his IQ.”
“He’s damaged Harvard over the years,” Kotlikoff said. “It should be one strike, you’re out in the context of being a representative of Harvard University at the level he was and is. Two strikes strikes me as too many, and if he wanted to contribute to Harvard, if he really cared about Harvard, the best course of action would be to resign.”
Epstein’s emails also showed that Summers’ wife, Harvard professor Elisa New, asked him to help broker a $500,000 donation from former Apollo Global Management chief executive Leon Black for her poetry foundation.
That revelation, along with growing calls for Harvard to cut ties with Summers following his own emails with Epstein, led the university to open a new review into ties between Epstein and Summers, New, and other Harvard affiliates. While he initially vowed to continue teaching, Summers announced last week he would take a leave from Harvard during the investigation.
McCarthy said there is consensus on campus that Summers should step away from the school.
“It’s abundantly clear that Larry Summers’ time for retirement has come,” he said. “This week l have not heard one person — no student, no staff, no faculty member, no administrator, no alum that I have talked to or come into contact with — who thinks Larry Summers should continue to stay.”
Laura Crimaldi can be reached at laura.crimaldi@globe.com. Follow her @lauracrimaldi. Aidan Ryan can be reached at aidan.ryan@globe.com. Follow him @aidanfitzryan. Anjali Huynh can be reached at anjali.huynh@globe.com.