Summers Will Not Finish Semester of Teaching as Harvard Investigates Epstein Ties

Updated November 19, 2025, at 7:38 p.m.

Former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers will immediately leave his role as an instructor at Harvard while the University investigates his ties to child sex trafficker Jeffrey E. Epstein.

“His co-teachers will complete the remaining three class sessions of the courses he has been teaching with them this semester, and he is not scheduled to teach next semester,” a spokesperson for Summers wrote in a Wednesday statement to The Crimson.

Summers will also immediately go on leave from his role as the director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has led the center, which focuses on studying policy issues in the public and private sector, since 2011.

“Mr. Summers has decided it’s in the best interest of the Center for him to go on leave from his role as Director as Harvard undertakes its review,” the spokesperson wrote in a Wednesday evening statement.

The spokesperson declined to comment on whether Summers is planning on returning to the center in the future.

On Monday, Summers — who served as United States Treasury Secretary under the Clinton administration — said he would step back from all public commitments, while continuing to teach undergraduate and graduate students and leading the Mossavar-Rahmani center, according to a spokesperson.

But by Wednesday night — just one day after Harvard announced that it would probe his ties to Epstein — he had changed his mind amid mounting pressure.

University spokesperson Jason A. Newton confirmed in a Wednesday statement that Summers had communicated his decision to Harvard.

The unprecedented move comes days after The Crimson reported that Summers confided in Epstein about his romantic pursuit of a woman he described as his mentee. In messages and emails over seven months, Epstein workshopped Summers’ texts and interactions with the woman, calling himself Summers’ “wing man.” At one point, the two discussed the probability that Summers would have sex with the woman, a prominent Chinese economist.

In the aftermath of the exchanges between Summers and Epstein becoming public, Summers relinquished or was let go from several roles he held with prominent organizations, including his position on OpenAI’s board of directors and as a contributor to Bloomberg News and the New York Times.

Summers has had a long and high-profile history with Harvard spanning several decades. He served as its president from 2001 to 2006 and has held the title of University Professor — Harvard’s highest faculty distinction — since 2011.

Summers resigned from Harvard’s presidency in 2006 after facing national uproar over his remarks on women in science at an economics conference in 2005 and discontent among Harvard faculty over his management of the University.

Outside of brief stints in Washington, he has continued to teach at Harvard in the years since.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

​​—Staff writer Dhruv T. Patel can be reached at dhruv.patel@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @dhruvtkpatel.

—Staff writer Cam N. Srivastava can be reached at cam.srivastava@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @camsrivastava.