by CKR
A currently politically correct (rightwing) interpretation of Larry Summers's resignation from the presidency of Harvard University is that political correctness (leftwing) brought him down. So say the Economist, the Times of London, and the Los Angeles Times, along with many others.
It is true that Summers did some good things for students and irritated the faculty. It is true that he was brought in to "reform" some of Harvard's practices. But it is necessary to bring the people you want to reform along with you, the faculty in this case, and Summers didn't bother to do that. Sometimes it appeared that he was going out of his way to irritate them.
But is that the main story here? Timing suggests otherwise, and Time and The Nation have picked up that story.
The Institutional Investor published an 18,000-word story about a month ago on the Andrei Schleifer affair. Schleifer went to Russia from Harvard in the 1990s on a grant from US AID to help with the development of free markets. He, his wife and associates wound up pushing their own investment schemes and getting wealthy. The government found this to be a misuse of its funds and sued Harvard for $31 million. Schleifer is still a professor in Harvard's economics department, and the committee that investigates ethics violations has lain dormant. Summers urged the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences to keep Schleifer on.
Summers has been Schleifer's friend for a long time, before Schleifer went to Russia, through those times when Summers was in the Treasury Department and the World Bank and on to today. The Institutional Investor article found no connection between Summers and Schleifer beyond friendship. The Harvard Corporation has said that he had no connection to their part in the Schleifer lawsuit.
The Institutional Investor article may have been the last straw on the camel's back. But it raises questions as to Summers's relationship with Schleifer while Schleifer and friends were partying it up in Moscow.