Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers will step down from his professorship at the University at the end of the academic year, the New York Times reported today, as he found himself in the eye of the storm when his ties to the convicted sex offender were revealed.
University spokesman Jason Newton confirmed that “as part of the government’s ongoing review of documents recently released” in the Epstein case, Harvard’s chancellor accepted the professor’s resignation.
Summers, secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton and then president of Harvard at the turn of the millennium, announced in November that he would retire from public life but retain his position at the university. He had also resigned from the board of OpenAI, developer of the ChatGPT artificial intelligence tool, and was placed on leave as director of a school of business and government services at the university.
The documents released by the US government also included personal correspondence between Summers and Epstein, but it did not appear that the politician and academic had committed any crime. He had declared in November that he was “deeply ashamed” of his actions and that he would withdraw from his duties to “restore relations with his relatives”.
