Economics Faculty Lined Up Behind Summers

Last September, Ramsey Professor of Political Economy Richard J. Zeckhauser attended a speech by Lawrence H. Summers at the ARCO forum about globalization and debt relief for poor countries.

Sitting next to him was a member of the Harvard presidential search committee.

After the talk, Summers fielded questions on recent speculation that he was interested in becoming the University's twenty-seventh president. He declined to comment on his future plans, saying only that "I am sufficiently occupied with [my work] in Washington."

And Zeckhauser, a long-time friend of Summers' who has kept in touch with him since his days as a Harvard professor, turned to the person in the next seat.

"I said something to the committee member like, 'He really engaged the undergraduates' questions effectively,'" Zeckhauser recalled. "The committee member said something like, 'Yes, but I can't really talk about that.'"

And though search committee members remained tight-lipped throughout the process, friends of Summers had many opportunities to talk to committee members behind the scenes about their favorite candidate.

Friends who wrote letters or met with the committee said they stressed Summers' managerial skill at the Treasury Department, where he oversaw a staff of 16,000 people--comparable, they said, to the administrative demands of his new position.

Besides his work in Washington, several economics professors said they emphasized Summers' short career as a star economist at Harvard to the search committee.

At the time of his appointment, Summers was the University's youngest tenured professor, and former colleagues said he was unusually committed to nurturing junior faculty.

Midway through the search process--after Al Gore '69 lost the presidential election and Summers' days at Treasury seemed numbered--Abbe Professor of Economics Dale W. Jorgenson said he began to worry Summers' academic qualifications were being overshadowed by his political achievements.

As undersecretary and then secretary at Treasury, Summers worked on deficit reduction and revamping the Internal Revenue Service. He gained his greatest prominence for his work on China's accession to the World Trade Organization and on the U.S. financial bailout of Mexico and especially his handling of the Asian financial crisis.

"People were just focusing on that," Jorgenson said. "I had the impression that people needed to familiarize themselves with his academic background again."

So in January, Jorgenson wrote a letter to the search committee, detailing Summers' record as a recipient of prestigious academic prizes, including the 1993 John Bates Clark medal, an award given to an outstanding American economist under the age of 40. He wrote about Summers' "very busy" pace of research and instruction when he taught at the University and his important work in fields from labor issues to behavioral economics.

"You put all these things together and here's a guy who's a brilliant academic," Jorgenson said. "People needed to relearn what he was like in that role."

Many professors in the Economics Department are like Jorgenson--people who know Summers from graduate school, from his time as an assistant professor at MIT or his tenure as a Harvard professor.

Friends say Summers commanded strong loyalty among former students and colleagues at Harvard even after he moved to Washington.

Zeckhauser, one of the professors whom Summers has talked with regularly for years, said Harvard was never far from Summers' mind--even during his tenure as treasury secretary.

"It was remarkable to me," he said. "Taiwan was going down the drain...and he would say, 'What's going on at Harvard? Who's getting appointed? The land acquisition at Allston, what does that mean?'"

Following an invitation to students and faculty members to send written input on the presidential search, many professors in the Economics Department wrote letters to the search committee commending the then-head of the Treasury Department.

His friends from the University and elsewhere--including former Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin '70--also met with the committee many times during the nine-month search. But whatever influence they possessed collectively, they are modest about the individual sway they had over the secretive body.

"I was one of many, I'm sure, who spoke with the search committee about Larry," Rubin said. "I would tell them what I said all along, that he was extremely well qualified."

Former White House Chief of Staff Gene Sperling said he followed Summers' appointment to his position at the Treasury very closely. But, in the tightly-controlled Harvard presidential selection process, Sperling said, "it wasn't something where I personally was helpful."

The search committee actively sought out input from some long-time Summers acquaintances, but just knowing the presidential contender was no guarantee of influence.

Professor of Economics Kenneth S. Rogoff, who has known Summers since graduate school and has been teaching at Harvard for less than two years said he was not invited by the search committee.

"I wrote a letter like everyone else did," he said. "I don't know if my support carried any weight."