Former Harvard University president Larry Summers will step back from teaching amid a university investigation into his ties with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, multiple news outlets reported Wednesday.
“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,” a spokesperson for Summers told The Boston Globe. Summers will also step aside from serving as director of the Kennedy School’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government.
The Hill has reached out to Summers and Harvard for comment.
Summers had previously announced, through a spokesperson, that he would leave his teaching role and not finish working through the rest of the semester, The Harvard Crimson, Harvard’s campus newspaper, reported Wednesday.
“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 told the Crimson.
Summers is not resigning from his posts at Harvard and has told the university about his decision to step back from both roles, the Globe reported.
Summers, who served as former President Clinton’s treasury secretary and as an economic adviser to former President Obama, resigned from his role on the OpenAI board, the board previously told The Hill.
“We appreciate his many contributions and the perspective he brought to the Board,” the board said in a statement.
The resignation and stepping back at Harvard come after Summers’s name appeared in several email exchanges with Epstein released by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee last week. The exchanges took place after Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting minors for prostitution and soliciting a prostitute. He served 13 months in prison.
One of his messages to Epstein in March 2019 about his interaction with a girl reads, “I said what are you up to. She said ‘I’m busy’. I said awfully coy u are.”
On Monday, Summers said he was “stepping back from public commitments” after the emails were made public.
“I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused. I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein,” Summers said in a statement previously obtained by NewsNation, The Hill’s sister company.
At the time, Summers said would continue “to fulfill my teaching obligations” at Harvard.
The New York Times also decided not to extend his contract as a contributing writer for its opinion section over the fallout, along with his departure as a distinguished senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and as an adviser for the Budget Lab at Yale, according to The Guardian.
On Wednesday, President Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which directs the Department of Justice (DOJ) to release all unclassified records and documents connected to Epstein.
Attorney General Pam Bondi now has 30 days to “make publicly available in a searchable and downloadable format all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials in the possession of the Department of Justice, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and United States Attorneys’ Offices, that relate to Epstein,” the new law states.
