Who is Larry Summers? Former US treasury secretary set to resign from Harvard professor role over ties with Jeffrey Epstein

Former US Treasury Secretary and past Harvard University president Larry Summers has announced that he will resign from his teaching and faculty roles at Harvard University amid controversy over his ties to convicted sex offender and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

Harvard confirmed that Summers will retire from his academic appointments at the end of the current academic year. He was on , who leave since November 2025. He will give up his title of University Professor, Harvard’s highest faculty rank, and will not teach or take on new students again.




Summers’s resignation comes as the university conducts a review of newly released government documents that include details of his long-standing personal relationship with Epstein. In those documents, Summers’s name appears hundreds of times in emails and other correspondence with Epstein.

A Harvard spokesperson said Summers decided to retire from his academic roles and remain on leave until the end of the academic year. In a statement, Summers said the decision was difficult and expressed gratitude to students and colleagues he worked with over nearly five decades.

Summers has had a long and influential career in public service and academia. He served as US Treasury Secretary from 1999 to 2001 during the Clinton administration and was president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006. He also held major roles in financial policy and economic research.

The row over Summers’s ties to Epstein escalated after millions of pages of records related to Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell were released by the US Department of Justice. The documents showed Summers maintained contact with Epstein long after Epstein’s 2008 conviction on sex offence charges, including emails in the years before Epstein’s arrest in 2019.

The impact of these revelations has been serious. Summers withdrew from several public roles after the documents were released, including resigning from the OpenAI board of directors in November 2025. Other organisations have also reviewed their connections with him, leading to further professional consequences.

Harvard’s review into Summers’s connections with Epstein is part of a bigger investigation into the university’s historical links to Epstein and his network.

Summers said he hopes to continue engaging in scholarly research and commentary after his formal retirement from Harvard, but he will no longer hold academic positions at the university once his resignation takes effect at the end of this academic year.