Los Angeles Times
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- 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 a recurring spate of internal 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 C. Bok, who served as Harvard president for two decades, from 1971 to 1991, was named interim president and will take over on July 1 until a new candidate is chosen by the 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” 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 insisted that his hand had not been forced by the corporation 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 added.Still, over the past week, several members of the corporation had begun privately interviewing a number of disenchanted faculty members, hinting that they were trying to decide whether to intervene before a critical no-confidence vote scheduled for next week by the Arts and Sciences faculty.Several professors 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 women faculty members. During an onstage presentation, Summers had questioned whether ‘’issues of intrinsic aptitude” rather than gender discrimination played a critical 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 a 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 Shliefer, then agreed last 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 C. Kirby. Many faculty members felt that Kirby was forced to resign -- a move that came suddenly two months after Summers had insisted publicly that he was not pressing for Kirby’s ouster.Barry reported from Cambridge and Braun from Washington. Times staff writers Rebecca Trounson and Stuart Silverstein reported from Los Angeles.
