Harvard’s President to Resign

Besieged Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers announced Tuesday that he would resign at the end of the academic year, avoiding open warfare with a growing bloc of alienated faculty members and ending a five-year tenure mired in controversy.

Summers, a former Treasury secretary renowned for his intellect and his impatience, had appeared to weather fractious relations with the esteemed university’s faculty of arts and sciences last year after he made public amends for his acerbic management style and for remarks that had angered many of Harvard’s female faculty members.

But Summers fell victim to recurring clashes with professors and new concerns about his handling of the resignation of a popular dean and a legal scandal involving an old friend in the university’s economics department.

During a telephone news conference Tuesday, Summers said he had made the decision on his own last week after concluding “very reluctantly that the agenda for the university I cared about, as well as my own satisfaction, would be best served by stepping down.”

Summers’ stint as Harvard’s president was one of the shortest in the university’s history. Derek Bok, Harvard’s president from 1971 to 1991, is to take over July 1 as interim president until a replacement is chosen by Harvard Corp., the university’s governing board. Summers said he would take a sabbatical and return to Harvard as one of the school’s elite “University Professors.”

Summers said he was leaving with a sense of satisfaction for overhauling Harvard’s undergraduate courses, improving science facilities and launching a major expansion in the Boston neighborhood of Allston.

But he wearily admitted to “mixed emotion,” expressing regret for “rifts and cleavages” that continually damaged his relations with faculty members. At the same time, Summers complained that faculty parochialism had thwarted his initiatives.

“Certainly there were moments when I could have challenged the community more wisely and more respectfully,” Summers said. “Those too are lessons to be learned.”

Summers said his hand had not been forced by the board, whose seven members guide university planning and hiring decisions. “Obviously, in talking to a number of people, I spoke with members of the corporation, but it was my decision,” he said.

Still, over the last week, several members of the board had begun privately interviewing a number of disenchanted faculty members, hinting that they were trying to decide whether to intervene before a pivotal no-confidence vote scheduled for next week by the arts and sciences faculty.

Several professors said board members appeared concerned that relations between Summers and his arts and sciences faculty were reaching a breaking point.

The two camps drifted apart last year after Summers angered female faculty members. During an onstage presentation, he questioned whether “issues of intrinsic aptitude” rather than gender discrimination played a crucial role in the paucity of female professors in Harvard’s science and mathematics departments.

Weeks later, he apologized and promised to listen more keenly to faculty complaints. But in recent months, several faculty members said, there were new causes for concern. Among the “fresh wounds,” said one professor, were new complaints of slights and mistreatment by Summers toward professors and lower-level administrators.

Summers also drew fire for his handling of a messy lawsuit against Andrei Shleifer, a friend and prominent Harvard economist who was accused of defrauding the U.S. government through a funding program designed to help transform Russia into a market economy. Harvard defended Shleifer, then agreed in August to pay a $26-million penalty.

But for many faculty members, the final blow was the resignation last month of arts and sciences Dean William Kirby. Many faculty members believed that Kirby had been forced to resign -- a move that came suddenly two months after Summers had insisted publicly that he was not pressing for Kirby’s departure.

Former presidential advisor David Gergen, a Summers admirer and director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, said that “there was some sentiment on the board to fight it out” on Summers’ behalf.

But a veteran professor, who spoke with board members and declined to be named because their conversations were confidential, said that “if Larry Summers wasn’t pushed, there wasn’t much pull for him, either.”

Last year, the arts and sciences faculty -- which makes up more than half of Harvard’s academic staff -- had passed a similar no-confidence vote against Summers, 218 to 185. However, the new rebuke was expected to pass overwhelmingly -- a glaring sign of the steady erosion in Summers’ support among faculty members during recent months.

“He didn’t want to go into a long, poisonous, protracted battle that would last through the spring,” Gergen said.

Several professors who had taken leading roles in trying to bridge the two camps expressed sadness over Summers’ decision but said it was necessary to heal the divided campus.

“We’ve had an outcome that is very positive for the future health and welfare of Harvard,” said Kay Kaufman Shelemay, a professor of music and a member of Harvard’s Committee on General Education. “I hope we’ll continue much of his agenda -- curriculum reform, the move into Allston -- but under somewhat more collegial conditions.”

After submitting his resignation announcement to the board, Summers was buoyed by a group of 150 students who crowded around him as he left his office. “Stay, Larry, stay!” some shouted.

In a poll released Tuesday by the Harvard Crimson, the campus newspaper, students said by a 3-1 ratio that they would prefer that Summers stay on. But some students who learned of his resignation later in the day showed little emotion over the issue.

Danielle Alletag and Hai Tiet, eating salads at Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square, were finishing papers when word of Summers’ resignation reached them about 6 p.m. Alletag, 20, said she was shocked, but added that the change would have little effect on her life at Harvard. Summers, she said, was as distant as “the president of the U.S.”

Passions still ran high among Harvard professors who had argued for five years over Summers in faculty halls and at dinner parties.

Opposition coalesced among arts and sciences professors worried about perceived mistreatment and institutional neglect by Summers and his aides. Summers found more supporters at the law and business schools and in several science graduate departments.

Law professor and author Alan Dershowitz, an outspoken Summers partisan, declared the resignation “a disaster for the university. This is a coup d’etat orchestrated by a small plurality of one faculty of Harvard.”

Dershowitz and some outspoken Summers supporters have claimed that much of the opposition to his reforms has had an ideological cast. Summers was condemned for pressing former Harvard African American studies professor Cornel West into leaving for Princeton in 2002. And he was also castigated by antiwar members of the faculty for insisting that a military ROTC program -- long denied at Harvard -- had a place on campus.

“The hard left smelled blood in the water,” Dershowitz said.

West seemed to take some satisfaction Tuesday in Summers’ resignation. Echoing Malcolm X, he said: “I’ve always said, ‘I’m praying for him, but chickens come home to roost.’ And they have come home.” West said Summers had “a Washington-based style that was disrespectful, lacked integrity and just didn’t fit within the academic context.”

As an assistant Treasury official and later head of the agency during the Clinton administration, Summers carved a reputation for incisive takes on policy that were accompanied by awkward public comments and withering treatment of subordinates.

That abrasive style did not transfer well from the give-and-take of the public sphere to the more refined pace of academia. David Ward, president of a Washington-based umbrella group for the nation’s major universities, compared Summers’ tumultuous tenure at Harvard to a Shakespeare play, complete with tragic hero.

“Larry is bigger than life, a brilliant economist, a success at governance and was leading the university that is considered the best in the world,” said Ward, of the American Council on Education. “But it just didn’t work.”

Warren Bennis, a USC management professor and an expert on leadership issues who has spent several semesters at Harvard in recent years as a visiting scholar, said Summers was oblivious to the ways he antagonized many of the university’s professors.

“I don’t think you can be a successful leader of any kind with an ego the size of Texas,” Bennis said. “And that’s what we’re talking about here.”

Barry reported from Cambridge and Braun from Washington. Times staff writers Rebecca Trounson and Stuart Silverstein in Los Angeles contributed to this report.