Harvard's Crimson Face

(2 of 2)

Women aren't the only group that has been alienated by Summers' rough-and-tumble manner. Soon after leaving his post as President Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary and returning to the Cambridge campus where he earned his Ph.D. and taught economics in the 1980s, Summers questioned African-American studies professor Cornel West's scholarship and teaching, causing West to leave for Princeton and upsetting many in Harvard's African-American community. In a controversy in 2002, Muslims on campus said they were offended when Summers labeled as "anti-Semitic in their effect if not in their intent" the efforts of a group of students and faculty to persuade Harvard to divest its holdings in companies that do business in Israel as a protest against its treatment of Palestinians. He rattled some Asian Americans at Harvard when he used an inaccurate statistic on child prostitution to illustrate a point about South Korea's economic growth. "Larry seems to have a knack for putting things in a way that annoys his audience," says Richard Bradley, author of the forthcoming book Harvard Rules. "He's constitutionally incapable of being inoffensive."

If nothing else, Summers' gaffes have provided new motivation for many Harvard groups to play hardball on their own behalf. His remarks on women's advancement in math and science raised some "important questions, and we should find the answers," says economics professor Claudia Goldin. Summers, she says, "said things I want to prove wrong." --With reporting by Matt Kelly/Boston