Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Resignation of Larry Summers

I gather from the Times that Larry Summers is about to resign as Harvard's President. Although he dug his own grave by making various impolitic and questionable statements, I regard this as an unfortunate turn of events. Admittedly judging him from a distance, Summers seemed to be someone who cared about academic standards and about taking teaching obligations seriously, and who, to some extent, ran into interest group opposition that ably took advantage of his blunders.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I worked in WDC in various tax offices (private sector and Capitol Hill) when Summers was at Treasury. I only dealt with him at a distance (conferences, hearings, etc.), but he obviously was intelligent, studied and interested in effecting better policies and policy practices. But he also was not very socially adept, and his speeches often contained awkward phrasing. This inability to maneuver the semantics issues and more clearly explain himself publicly, I suspect, hurt him as much as his actual statements.