Larry Summers, the former Harvard president who served as Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton and as a top economic adviser to Barack Obama, is leaving the university after documents tying him to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein surfaced in a government release.
A Harvard spokesperson confirmed Wednesday that Summers resigned from his leadership role as co-director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, and that he will retire from all academic and faculty appointments at the end of this academic year.
Harvard Kennedy School Dean Jeremy Weinstein accepted the resignation. Summers will remain on leave until his departure is finalized, Fox News reported.
The resignation comes as Harvard conducts what it describes as an "ongoing review" of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein that were recently released by the government. A House committee also released a trove of emails connected to Summers' communications with the late convicted sex offender.
The details of those communications have not been made fully public in the available material, but the trajectory tells its own story. Summers announced last November that he was stepping away from teaching. Now, months later, he's walking away from Harvard entirely.
That's not how quiet retirements work. That's how forced exits unfold in slow motion.
Summers, through a spokesperson, framed the departure as a personal choice. In a statement sent to Fox News Digital, he said:
"I have made the difficult decision to retire from my Harvard professorship at the end of this academic year."
He followed that with a tribute to his half-century at the institution:
"I will always be grateful to the thousands of students and colleagues I have been privileged to teach and work with since coming to Harvard as a graduate student 50 years ago."
And then, the tell. Summers signaled he isn't planning to disappear:
"Free of formal responsibility, as President Emeritus and a retired professor, I look forward in time to engaging in research, analysis, and commentary on a range of global economic issues."
Translation: he's leaving the institution but keeping the title. "President Emeritus" still carries weight in the rooms where Summers has spent his career operating. The resignation sheds the formal accountability without shedding the prestige.
As attention around Epstein’s network grows, Summers joins a line of elite figures who have quietly departed prestigious positions. The sequence has become predictable. Documents emerge that tie a powerful person to Epstein. In response, the affiliated institution declares a formal review. Before long, the individual steps down, usually pointing to personal considerations or future plans. The institution continues forward and does not reveal the outcome of its internal examination.
What's notable is the consistent lack of transparency. Harvard's spokesperson confirmed the resignation in connection with the Epstein document review, but offered nothing about the scope of that review, what it has uncovered, or whether further action is expected. The public is left to connect the dots that the institutions themselves refuse to draw.
Summers' résumé reads like a tour of every institution the American establishment holds sacred. Harvard. The Treasury Department. The White House. These are the places that credential the people who run the country, and for decades, the people inside them assured the public that their judgment could be trusted precisely because of those credentials.
Jeffrey Epstein exploited that trust. He embedded himself among the most powerful and prestigious figures in American life, and those figures let him in. The question was never whether Epstein had access to powerful people. The question is what that access bought, and whether the institutions those people led will ever provide honest answers.
Harvard's "ongoing review" is not reassuring. It is the bureaucratic equivalent of running out the clock. Reviews without public findings are not accountable. They are management.
The House committee's release of emails suggests that congressional investigators are not finished pulling threads. Every new document dump carries the potential to implicate additional figures, and each resignation raises the pressure on others still clinging to their positions.
Summers will keep his emeritus title. He'll keep his connections. He'll comment on "global economic issues" from whatever perch he builds next. But he won't do it from inside Harvard, and the reason he won't is that he chose to leave after 50 years of service.
It's because the documents arrived before he could.