In a statement Wednesday, Harvard said former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers will resign from teaching at Harvard University at the end of the academic year as the campus reviews his connections to Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender. The university said Summers had been on leave since November and that his name appeared hundreds of times in newly released Epstein-related files reviewed by The Associated Press.
Harvard spokesperson Jason Newton said Summers will remain on leave until that end-of-year date. “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,” Newton said.
Summers’ decision to step down came with a statement from him in which he described the choice as difficult and expressed gratitude for his work at Harvard over more than five decades, including five years as president. “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 said.
The Harvard announcement follows a wider wave of fallout tied to the Justice Department’s release of millions of pages of records involving Epstein and his longtime confidant and former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell. The Associated Press reported that those newly released files shed additional light on Epstein’s ties to researchers and academics, including people who sought funding and maintained friendships even after Epstein became a convicted sex offender.
The AP report said Summers’ relationship with Epstein spanned years and included visits to one another at their homes in Massachusetts and New York, along with email exchanges covering topics ranging from politics and the economy to women and romance. The report also said emails from 2018 and 2019 showed Summers consulting Epstein about a separate relationship with a woman he was tutoring in economics, and that Epstein encouraged persistence while describing himself as Summers’ “wing man.”
According to the AP’s account, an email Summers sent in 2018 referred to his wife and expressed concern about risking his “very good life w Lisa kids etc.” for something that “might not materialize at all or if it does might prove transient.” The AP also reported that a 2016 email appeared to use a slur for Asian people while discussing an upcoming meeting between Epstein and an official from a Chinese university.
Summers last year said he had “great regrets in my life” and that his association with Epstein was a “major error in judgement,” the AP reported. Harvard officials, the AP said, had publicly said little about Summers’ relationship and, when he went on leave last year, the university described that it was reviewing “individuals at Harvard” who were present in Epstein documents to evaluate what actions might be warranted.
The AP report placed Summers’ relationship to Harvard in the broader context of other Epstein-related institutional scrutiny, including a 2020 campus report that found the financier gave more than $9 million to Harvard, mostly for a center founded by math and biology professor Martin Nowak, while not mentioning Summers’ relationship with Epstein. The report also said Nowak was later disciplined by Harvard.
The AP said Summers had also faced additional consequences outside Harvard, including a lifetime ban from the American Economic Association in December over his Epstein ties, and that he had left the board of directors at OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. It added that the resignations followed similar steps by other prominent academics and institutions after the Justice Department’s records release.
In a separate development, Columbia University’s Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute co-director Richard Axel announced Tuesday that he would step down. The AP said Axel regretted his association with Epstein, calling it a “serious error in judgment,” and that he also planned to give up his position as an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute while continuing to research and teach in his laboratory at the Zuckerman Institute in Manhattan.
Axel, a Nobel laureate, was one of the 2004 winners of the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine related to discoveries involving the human olfactory system, according to the AP. The AP reported that Axel’s name appeared more than 600 times in the Justice Department files it reviewed, including in emails exchanged with Epstein and in schedules noting meetings, dinners and lunches.
The resignations and reviews in the United States came alongside reported legal actions in Britain involving people connected to Epstein and Maxwell, the AP reported, including former Prince Andrew and ex-diplomat Peter Mandelson. The AP said they were arrested because of their connections to Epstein and Maxwell, as additional institutions reassessed relationships reflected in the government records.