Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers is leaving his role as an instructor at Harvard University after more ties to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein surfaced last week.
“His co-teachers will complete the remaining three class sessions of the courses he has been teaching with them this semester, and he is not scheduled to teach next semester,” a spokesperson for Summers said in a statement on Thursday.
He will also go on leave from his role as director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School as the university undertakes its review, the spokesperson added.
Summers taught economics at Harvard.
A Harvard spokesperson directed Business Insider to Summers’ team for comment.
In a statement on Monday, Summers said that he was “deeply ashamed” of his actions and the pain they caused after emails showing his friendship with Epstein surfaced last week.
Epstein was an American financier and convicted sex offender known for his elite social circle. In 2019, he killed himself in jail before his trial for sex-trafficking charges, which prosecutors said involved underage girls. Epstein’s social network over the years included prominent politicians and celebrities, including US Presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, and Britain’s Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince Andrew.
The emails, showing years of personal correspondence between the two men, were released by the House Oversight Committee last week. They revealed that Summers, who was Treasury Secretary under Clinton and an advisor to Barack Obama, sought advice from Epstein on how he could romantically pursue a woman he called his mentee.
In a separate exchange, Summers suggested that women have a lower IQ than men. In 2005, similar remarks by Summers about women’s aptitude in mathematics compared with men prompted a public outcry and his resignation as Harvard’s president in 2006.
Summers had long been associated with Epstein. He flew on Epstein’s private plane, according to flight logs obtained by Gawker in 2015, and appeared on Epstein’s 2014 calendar, per scheduling emails obtained by Business Insider in 2023.
In Monday’s statement, Summers said that he would step back from public commitments to “repair relationships with the people closest” to him.
In a TikTok posted on Tuesday on Tuesday, Summers appeared to speak to his students about the statement.
“I think it’s very important to fulfill my teaching obligations,” he told the students.
Summers’ departure from his role at Harvard comes after Sen. Elizabeth Warren called on Harvard to sever ties with him.
Warren, who spent nearly two decades teaching at Harvard Law School and previously sparred with Summers over economic policy, told CNN on Monday that Summers’ relationship with Epstein “demonstrates monumentally bad judgment.”
“If he had so little ability to distance himself from Jeffrey Epstein even after all that was publicly known about Epstein’s sex offenses involving underage girls, then Summers cannot be trusted to advise our nation’s politicians, policymakers, and institutions — or teach a generation of students at Harvard or anywhere else,” she told CNN.
Warren’s press secretary referred Business Insider to an X post that the senator shared on Wednesday.
“Larry Summers cozied up to the rich and powerful — including a convicted sex offender. He cannot be trusted in positions of influence,” she wrote.
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