Summers Bids Farewell to Undergrads

A small crowd of students braved the rain yesterday night to offer their last farewells to University President Lawrence H. Summers, and the outgoing Big Man on Campus left them with some parting advice: “be big.”

The Sever Hall gathering was billed as the president’s “final event” with undergraduates—a constituency principally friendly to the president—and drew about 50 students, many of them members of the Undergraduate Council (UC), which hosted the event.

And as Summers prepares to pack his bags, he offered a few pointers to the UC and the broader Harvard community for how to take advantage of the University’s unprecedented resources, such as its swelling endowment.

“Be big,” Summers said. “At a time like this, the question should never be what you’re against. It should be what you’re for, and what each of us individually can do that is really important and that can make a difference and change the world...this University, as it strengthens itself, has the potential to do just that.”

Asked to assess his legacy, Summers initially hesitated, but said he hoped it would be most influenced by his view that Harvard should act to try new initiatives rather than miss important opportunities.

“I’ve tried to lead with a philosophy that life is short, and that the time is now,” Summers said.

For the president, the event capped a five-year relationship with undergraduates in which he signed students’ dollar bills, taught freshman seminars and a Core class, and showed off his dance moves at freshman study breaks.

Undergrads said three-to-one that they did not want Summers to resign, according to a poll taken by The Crimson in February. On the day Summers announced his resignation, he was greeted outside his Mass Hall office by throngs of students chanting “Stay, Larry, stay.”

Speaking to junior parents in March, Summers acknowledged his amicable relationship with undergraduates, saying he felt he had “a great sense of rapport with the students in the College.”

But some bumps in the relationship emerged during his presidency—like reports early in his tenure that he had referred to the College as “Camp Harvard.”

Asked about those reports last night, Summers said he “was substantially misquoted” and did not remember “precisely in what context, if at all, I used the phrase ‘Camp Harvard.’”

But he said that if he had used the phrase, it was in reference to high student satisfaction in extracurricular actitivies outside academics—and his view that a similar level of excitement should be maintained in the classroom.

As the president’s office has taken a greater role in financing social programming and improvements to social spaces for undergraduates, Summers suggested that the structure of the College might need to evolve to eliminate the necessity for the president to get involved and make those investments.

“It shouldn’t need the president of the University...to get a few million dollars in order to make necessary investments, like Loker,” he said, referring to the plans to develop a pub, dubbed “Queen’s Head,” that will soon occupy space in Loker Commons.

Former UC President Matthew J. Glazer ’06 praised Summers for meeting with members of the council in the first days of his presidency.

“President Summers has done so much for this University, and this College in particular,” Glazer said.

Summers said Harvard had made great progress in strengthening the undergraduate experience—but that more work remains.

“You know and I know that surveys suggest we’ve still got substantial distance to go before a Harvard education is as good as our students are,” Summers said.

—Staff writer Nicholas M. Ciarelli can be reached at ciarelli@fas.harvard.edu.