On Tuesday, the American Economic Association banned Larry Summers for life from all activities. He was allowed to voluntarily resign his membership. This bars Summers from participating in any of its conferences, publications, editorial work, or refereeing of articles. It is an extraordinary rebuke, and as far as I can tell, unprecedented. The AEA statement barring Summers described his conduct as “fundamentally inconsistent with its standards of professional integrity and with the trust placed in mentors within the economics
profession.”
This action by the AEA almost surely foreshadows Summers’s firing from Harvard, where he is currently on leave from teaching but still holds Harvard’s most prestigious chair, a university professorship. Summers’s ultimate status at Harvard is still under review, but in his email correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein, Summers was seeking advice on how to get a graduate student whom he fancied to go to bed with him. Quite apart from the other creepy and juvenile material in the Summers-Epstein emails, it’s pretty obvious that a professor who hits on students cannot be allowed in the same room with them, and thus is not fit to be a professor.
Harvard seldom revokes tenure, but did so this year when professor Francesca Gino was accused of fabricating data in academic papers. Gino has denied the allegations. It was the first time in decades that Harvard revoked a professor’s tenure. According to an investigation in 2020 by The Harvard Crimson, every tenured Harvard professor embroiled in allegations of improper sexual advances either chose to retire or remained on the faculty. None was removed.
The process that led to AEA’s decision is confidential; however, ethics complaints are referred to an ethics committee, whose members are not disclosed. The committee’s recommendations are then referred to the AEA’s executive committee and officers. The decision of the executive committee is final.
The AEA’s current president is Lawrence Katz, a fellow Harvard professor who has published with Summers. The president-elect is Katharine Abraham of the University of Maryland. The executive committee, which is elected from the membership, fittingly enough, is currently made up disproportionately of women.
It was Summers’s disparaging comments about women’s intellectual abilities that set in motion a series of events that ultimately led to his ouster as Harvard president. But the latest revelations depict a much cruder look at Summers’s adolescent id.
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