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.
If the personal ethics of a
professor matters, then an ethically-challenged organizational culture can be
counted on to protect its own unless sufficient external pressure is brought
to bear on the administration. Tehat U.S. Senator Warren, who represents Massachusetts,
called for Harvard to sever ties with Summers may have swayed the otherwise
stubborn academic administrators to sacrifice one of their own even though he
fit so well in that squalid, exclusivist organizational culture. Ironically, U.S.
President Trump’s charge that Harvard was antisemitic because the university
was allowing pro-human-rights students to protest in line with academic freedom
and free speech was sparked at least in part, again ironically, by Summers’ personally-biased
claim that Harvard was against Jews even thought the university’s president was
Jewish. It is also ironic that Harvard having become a police-state of sorts
even in Harvard Yard is in no small measure due to Summers’ erroneous claim of
antisemitism. In short, the plot concerning Harvard and Summers is much deeper and
more troubling than outsiders know. In fact, Summers was part of the problem of
exclusivism there, as he actively sought to have the university treat visiting
researchers in residence for a semester or more as outsiders—scholars as the
general public or library patrons without access to online articles and books,
or to talks at Summers’ school of government.
Harvard’s administration, steeped in the toxic art of passive aggression, is good at hiding what it is actually like being at Harvard on a daily basis, and Summers played an active role in perpetuating the organizational brain-sickness. With regard to Summer’s sudden leave of absence from teaching, it should be noted that in the immediate wake of the release, Summers was not accused of raping any of the adolescent girls at Epstein’s house or private island. But he had corresponded with Epstein for decades until July 5, 2019, a day before Epstein was arrested on federal sex-trafficking (of minors) charges. In fact, Summers asked Epstein for advice on how to get a woman, one of his “economic mentees,” “horizonal.” Epstein gave him unsavory advice. Summers’ efforts to have sex with a young woman “mentee” raises the question of whether as a professor at Harvard, Summers pressured any of the young women studying under him at Harvard; graduate students can be particularly vulnerable. At the very least, his attitude and beliefs about the academic aptitude of female students were a red flag. “With Democrats out of the White House, Summers returned to Harvard in 2001 as the university’s president. His tenure was defined by tumult, particularly in the wake of a 2005 speech at a conference about improving diversity in science and engineering. He suggested that women were less represented in those fields because of ‘intrinsic aptitude.’”[1] Combine this with his primitive way in which he discusses his conquests of younger women, perhaps even some being from among his students, and a creepy odor can be detected that is a red-flag concerning Summers being anywhere near female college students.
To be sure, shortly after the
emails were made public, Summers admitted even to his students in a class at
Harvard that he had used very bad judgment in having stayed in contact with the
pedophile ring-leader. This may have been a reputational and possibly job-saving
operation; he even asked his students for permission to continue as
their teacher, which signifies deceit because professors do not need the
permission of students in order to teach. That crafty rhetoric dovetails with
the way he characterizes his sexual advances in his emails to Epstein. This “creepy”
factor is even more damning than is the fact that Summers stayed in contact
with Epstein for so long even as Summers was teaching undergraduates at
Harvard.
It may be wondered whether Summers
even liked and respected Harvard, for he had complained in an email to Epstein that
hitting on a few women was apparently worse as far as Harvard was concerned
than the history-department faculty accepting a woman as a Ph.D. student even
though she had been convicted of killing her boy. Appearances aside, I contend
that Summers fit in well with, and was a part of Harvard’s sordid organizational
culture. He had been president of Harvard, after all, so his interiorizing of
the organizational culture should not come as a surprise. A dysfunctional,
in-grown, presumptuous, and downright rude and passive-aggressive organizational
culture of a university, and any organization, is much more intractable and
thus difficult to undo than is cutting ties with an professor who has displayed
horrible moral judgment in regard to sexual ethics. If an institution employing
too many rude, pretentious, and disrespectful people happens to be very rich—the
richest university in North America—then organizational slack can enable even such
a place to endure for a very long time and even be able protect itself from public
scrutiny and even accountability.
U.S. President Trump was onto
something in going after Harvard, but he was wrong about Harvard being what
Summers claimed—antisemitic—just because some students protested on behalf of
human rights amid the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Just as Bruce Ackerman, another
Jewish professor, but at Yale, went after student protesters, Summers had
accused Harvard falsely. The university’s real fault lies in its unduly
restricting its academic resources, especially in its main library, to scholars
who are not on Harvard’s faculty, and Summers refused to correct this abysmal instance
of passive-aggression against invited guests. Harvard’s tax-free status should
obligate the administrators to make its extensive online and housed
books and articles available to scholars who are not on faculty at Harvard, given
that the Ph.D. (and J.S.D., and D.B.A., and D.Sci.M, and Ed.D.) are
academic-use credentials, whether the person is in industry or at another
university. I explained this to Summers in person, but he refused to contact
the head librarian so that I, as a visiting research-scholar, could access
online books and articles in 2024 and 2025, by which time access to online
materials for academic use had become vital to being able to conduct
research in the humanities. With this context concerning Summers in mind, the
question of whether a professor must be leading an ethical life outside of the
classroom in order to be able to continue to teach can now be considered in
full, with the presence of an overarching dysfunctional organizational culture
complicating the dynamics.
The bearing of a teacher’s
personal beliefs, whether religious or moral, goes back to why Socrates was put
to death. The ancient Greek philosopher stood accused of corrupting the youth
because he allegedly did not believe in the gods and goddesses in the Greek
pantheon. Socrates was righteous; he even refused efforts of others to help him
escape from the local jail before being executed because he believed that a
person’s duty to one’s city should not be only when the “weather” is good. To
the men who accused the philosopher of having corrupted the ideas of students, the
personal beliefs and conduct of a teacher did matter, a lot.
In ancient China, the
Confucian philosopher Xungi wrote the following on the importance of a teacher
being righteous: “if people follow through along with their inborn nature and
dispositions, they are sure to come to struggle and contention, turn to
disrupting social divisions and disorder, and end up in violence. So, it is
necessary to await the transforming influence of teachers and models and the
guidance of ritual and the standards of righteousness, and only then will they
come to yielding and deference, turn to culture and order, and end up under
control.”[2]
An unrighteous teacher cannot be transformative by guiding students to learn
more about how to behave in a way that is not greedy, power-hungry, and disrespectful
of other people. Xunxi castigated Menchus, another Confucianist, for positing
the existence of “moral sprouts,” such as benevolence, in human nature.
Righteousness and benevolence have to be learned and practiced by “deliberate
effort” according to Xungi, and the role of a teacher is crucial because this
cannot be forced.[3]
On the other hand, contemporary
colleges and universities are not purposed to transform students into being
benevolent and righteous people; rather, classes are oriented to particular
subject-matters, such as chemistry, history, mathematics, sociology, law, and
medicine. A teacher need not be righteous in order to convey and explain the
knowledge in these and other subjects, including science and engineering that
according to Summers are inherently difficult for the female brain to learn. He
could teach global economic policy regardless of what he had written to Epstein
on other matters. Transforming sordid elements of human nature into benevolent
and righteous channels—mastering rather than repressing the bad dispositions in
human nature—is not in the mission statement of a secular university. In fact,
since 1980, college students had been increasingly career-oriented in selecting
a major. This category-mistake, as flawed as it is, at least demonstrates how
far contemporary, non-religious universities (and even some that are religiously-affiliated)
had come from the ancient days when teachers were to be role models.
Even that amoral trajectory is
not immune from criticism. A professor of medicine who looks the other way when
students studying for the first (and thus undergraduate, as the D.Sci.M.
is the terminal degree in schools of Medicine) degree cheat rather than reports
those students to the dean’s office is surely not the sort of character that
universities should tolerate even just from an academic standpoint. Besides the obvious breach of academic
standards, who would like to have a surgeon who, back in medical school, had
been encouraged by a professor to cheat? When I was in an undergraduate class
in computer science, my one and only course in that field, a student who was
planning on going laterally to medical school next asked me during an
exam if he could cheat off me. I wouldn’t want him as my physician.
Similarly, how many parishioners
would be pleased to hear that their church’s minister or priest had been
encouraged to lie about his or her real religious beliefs on a church-board
exam in order to be ordained? Among
Episcopal students at Yale’s divinity school while I was a student at Yale
(mostly in religious studies, history and film studies, but also in theology),
lying on the Episcopal Church’s exam that, yes, the Resurrection did in fact happen
empirically and historically rather than just nominally in the Gospel stories was
not uncommonly done, according to more than one seminarian/Yale student. They
justified lying by the good that they could do as future priests. The lack of
integrity absolutely pertained to ministry, but deans at Yale’s divinity school
could have argued that what graduated students do on their vocational boards is
extrinsic to the university in having conferred a degree, just as what graduated
medical students do during their hospital residency rotations does not pertain
to medical schools. Furthermore, The point that graduation is a matter of
having learned enough of the knowledge being taught in the courses is valid;
applicants for degrees are not put through morality tests before being accepted,
and ethical problems would go along with such a requirement. So Richard Fern,
who taught Christian environmental ethics at Yale when I was a student, was ethically
wrong when he told me, because I asked academic questions beyond the
Christian creed, “A student must have a certain character to get a Yale degree.”
Decades later, I nodded affirmatively (and with surprise at the insight from “the
other school”), when more than one first-degree student at Harvard’s divinity school
told me that Yale’s school had the reputation of being a cult. What those
Harvard students did not care to reveal was that Harvard’s divinity school was
an exclusivist, intolerant “woke” cult, which included even reconfiguring
Hinduism as a monotheist faith to suit the Abrahamic Westerners. Summers’ erroneous
accusation that Harvard was antisemitic fit within that ideological bias.
Aside from Summers’ attitude
and creepy conduct in trying to get younger women “horizontal,” his bad
judgment, shown not just in regard to Epstein, can be argued to be a valid justification
for why he should not have been teaching after he was pressured to resign as
Harvard’s president ironically for what he had said about the inferior aptitude
for science and engineering. As U.S. Senator Warren said after the release of
the emails, “For decades, Larry Summers has demonstrated his attraction to
serving the wealthy and well-connected, but his willingness to cozy up to a
convicted sex offender demonstrates monumentally bad judgment.”[4]
Warren went on to say that “Summers could not be trusted to . . . teach a
generation of students at Harvard or anywhere else.”[5]
It was in 2019, while he was teaching at Harvard, that he sent an email to
Epstein “discussing interactions he had with a woman, writing: ‘I said what are
you up to. She said, ‘I’m busy.’ I said awfully coy u are.”[6]
She could have been one of Summers’ students. Epstein replied, “you reacted
well. . annoyed shows caring., no whining showed strentgh” (sic).[7]
Summers’ demonstrated lack of moral judgment went beyond remaining in contact
with Epstein after his guilty verdict; he would be a risk, maybe even a predator,
to his students who are young women. After all, office hours are not to be
geared to getting a student “horizontal.”
Furthermore, Summers’ emails
with Epstein could be just the tip of the iceberg concerning his malevolent, pushy
character, and ironically, how much his sordid character was in line with Harvard’s
callous “insider” culture that goes so far as to intentionally treat some people
there as if they were outsiders. When I was a visiting research-scholar in the
Liberal Arts at Harvard, I went to one of his talks at Harvard’s school of
government. One of my mother’s cousins had been Larry’s first economics teachers
in high school, so I was surprised when I stepped forward to introduce myself, that
his question was, “How did you get in?” I didn’t know if he meant how did I
manage to get into Harvard, or into his talk, as I had introduced myself as a
visiting research-scholar in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Visiting
research-scholars, unlike Fellows and visiting professors who teach, have Harvard
IDs but not Harvard email addresses. I told Larry that I had registered and
shown my ID at the door. Like mischievous clockwork, a month or so later a
Harvard email address rather than just an ID was required to register for and
attend any talk at the Kennedy school of government at Harvard.
Also indicative of Summers’
fit with Harvard’s inside-cadre, I asked him to intervene with Harvard’s head
librarian, for, before I had applied to Harvard, a librarian had assured me that
I could download online books and articles using two computers near the circulation
desk in Widener Library but not with my Harvardkey log-in. A month or so after
I arrived to do research, those two computers were changed such that they no
longer gave the access that is available “to any student or faculty member,” as
I had been told and relied on in coming to Harvard. The university librarians,
including hostile and disrespectful Francesca at Widener library, did not even
apologize for having reneged. For librarians to be so dismissive and rude to scholars,
whether on the faculty or visiting, highlights the sheer presumptuousness that
was, and no doubt still is, so salient among the dominant coalition of
employees and managers, including librarians, there. It is poignant that
visiting scholars doing solid, long-hours research daily would be such easy
prey for non-academic employees who are not themselves academic colleagues of
scholars, whether on faculty or visiting. As for the faculty, including Larry
Summers and Ben Friedman, both economists, they did not lift a finger. They had
no sense of what being a good host of academic colleagues meant. I suspect they
conveniently delimited “colleagueship” to fellow faculty members at Harvard,
which is an artificial bias, given that the Ph.D. is the academic credential
(which Francesca did not have and yet presumed superiority at a university).
Regarding Friedman, I
regularly sent him findings from my research that were relevant to his,
including my translation of Pierre Nicole’s essay on self-love and charity.
When I asked for his help towards the end of my stay, he threw up his hands and
said, “Oh, no! I can’t email the special collections person for you. I don’t
know your work. I’m not sponsoring you.” So, Larry Summers fit alongside his
colleagues in treating visiting researchers on campus for longer than a
semester as if we were the general public, or as mere library patrons and thus outsiders
without any affiliation to Harvard even though the university issues
university ID’s to us. I was doing more at Harvard than what one librarian characterized
me as doing: “being in a library,” as if I were a library patron. For one thing,
my Harvard ID number allowed me to sit in on courses as a guest scholar.
One class was in history, taught
by Henkins, who with his teaching assistant sent me a very rude email that even
though Henkins had invited me to attend his lectures, I was not allowed to
speak to Henkins. Another class was Latin. Because Francesca at Widener library
was uncooperative (and even rather hostile generally to me) refused to extend
my library access to the end of my last semester at Harvard, I asked
Ivy Livingston, the professor
of Latin, to write a brief note affirming that I could enter Harvard yard to
attend her class and study in the Classics building should a security guard confront
me because my access to the library had not been extended and the librarians and
a security guard at the divinity school had erroneously thought that my only
access at Harvard was to the libraries. In fact, Harvard’s administration
refused to allow my Harvard ID access to a sandwich/salad shop in the Yard![8]
Starkly refusing, Livingston said, “I can’t give you permission to study on
campus unless you have an affiliation.” That she had given her permission for
me to be a guest scholar/student in one of her classes did not depend on my
access to the library. Her rigidity and utter lack of any willingness to be
cooperative turned me off to such an depth that I immediately ceased my study
of Latin at Harvard. The use of “affiliation” as a passive-aggressive,
exclusionist weapon was too strong of a bad odor for me to breath. As Nietzsche conveys in his writings, the
strong breath heathy, clear air in self-confidence, whereas the weak who seek
to dominate can only breath the stagnant air of a hospital, given their innate
weakness and resentment of the strong.
Aside from the overzealous Securitas
subcontracted guard at the divinity school, a shift-head at Widener library
repeatedly sought to bully me by staring at me in an intimidating way. I
reported the guy to his boss, and his Securitas boss housed in Widener was
himself a bully to me for bring the matter of his “very good employee” to him with
photos as proof. Francesca refused to intervene on my behalf, which is why I
think she was so uncooperative in extending my access to the library to the end
of the Fall, 2025 term; it was a case petty retaliation because the librarians
liked the mischievous guard. Larry Summers fit well in that sordid culture,
whereas I saw its pettiness as a smallness of character. Trump should have gone
after those with such a sense of exclusivity and entitlement. The presumptuous
of self-entitlement is like arrogance on stilts; it should naturally be under
water rather than lording itself above us mere mortals.
Another irony is that Larry Summers’
false accusation against Harvard as being antisemitic triggered Harvard’s
administration to instigate its private police employees into being omnipresent
in Harvard Yard and near the science center, and even the divinity school, to
watch students. By overdoing the visuals of “presence” to intimidate the
undergraduates and even graduate students so they would not stand up in protest
for human rights as they were under assault in Ukraine and Gaza, Harvard
can be understood as projecting the squalid likes of Summers and several other
insiders there onto the threat being external, whether in students or the
public, which strangely includes visiting research scholars whose academic
credentials are reckoned as doormats ripe for mud rather than respect. In other
words, overdoing the private police presence on campus reflects back (as mental
projection) on there being more than a few nasty, passive-aggressive people in
key positions in the university’s hierarchy.
Such dysfunctional, self-entitled organizational culture is more dispersed than just one man, and so it is much more difficult to get rid of than Larry Summers. Just as Ben Friedman betrayed me by refusing to do me a small favor even though I had shared my translation of Pierre Nicole’s essay ironically on self-love and charity and many other research findings for over a year (and yet he claimed mendaciously not to know my work!), Harvard’s defensive elite turned on Summers. That he was one of them made no difference to the sordid cadre that runs Harvard with impunity. Trump should have gone after this rather than Summers’ biased charge of antisemitism. Having harbored Summers for decades, and being so petty at the library with research-scholars in residence for an extended period of time, and, moreover, in being so brazen in sending messages of exclusion, Harvard’s administration has a lot to answer for. Unfortunately, the organizational slack and defense mechanisms afforded by the wealthiest (and yet untaxed) university in North America mean that the dominant coalition will go one, unimpeded even while Larry Summers, who was 70 when he took (or was handed) his leave of absence in 2025, is no longer of concern as a retired man who could still write books in his field, for in that respect, in contributing to the knowledge in economics, his personal ethics do not matter.
2. Xunzi, The Xunzi, Pp. 248-91 in Philip J. Ivanhoe and Bryan W. Van Norden, ed.s. Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy. New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2001, p. 284.
3. Ibid.
4. Ryan Grenoble, “Elizabeth Warren Calls For Harvard To Cut Ties With Larry Summers,” The Huffington Post, November 17, 2025.
5. Ibid.
6. Steven Sloan, “What to know about Larry Summers, who has taken leave from Harvard due to Epstein emails,” The Associated Press, November 19, 2025.
7. Ibid.
8. Even though I was a guest in a class in the divinity school in the fall term of 2024, a security guard in that building misread my ID and claimed that I could only be in the library, and thus my arrival 30 minutes before the divinity library to buy a breakfast sandwich was not allowed. Interestingly, as in revealing the dominant mentality at Harvard, some administrator at the divinity school put up a sign on the main doors enforcing the library-access-only policy for visiting research-scholars. I never returned to that school; the stench of religious hypocrisy was too much for me. Bad air! I had even volunteered to help set up a business-religion center at the school, but the dean, who had urged me to email her, did not reply when I did. When passive aggression even lays waste to the profit motive (and potential alumni donations to a new center), you know something is wrong in America.
