Should instructors themselves lead
righteous, moral lives if they are going to be allowed to teach college
students? Does the character of a teacher matter? Should a professor be
inclusive rather than exclusivist? These questions are distinct from the much
more easily answered question of whether convicted criminals should be allowed to
teach college students. Harvard’s Larry Summers, the last U.S. Treasury
Secretary of the Clinton presidency, a president of Harvard University, and a
professor there, came to personify these moral questions in November, 2025 after
Congress released a trove of Jeffrey Epstein’s email exchanges with Summers. Besides
resigning from the board of OpenAI, Summers attempted to continue teaching, but
then suddenly announced that he was taking a leave of absence from Harvard even
though the semester had just a few weeks remaining (including Thanksgiving
break). If as I suspect Harvard’s administration pressured him to bow out, at
least temporarily in a leave of absence, the irony would be that such a sordid
organizational culture casted one of its own kind away. I contend that Summers’
case at Harvard is more complex than first meets the eye.
The full essay is at "Larry Summers' Emails to Epstein."
