As Tufts continues its own search for a new president, former Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence H. Summers passed the final hurdle to become Harvard University's 27th president. Acting on the recommendation of the presidential search committee, the Board of Overseers confirmed his appointment yesterday afternoon at the Rainbow Room in Manhattan.
Summers will replace current president Neil H. Rudenstine, who will step down in June after steering the 355-year-old university for a decade, according to The Harvard Crimson.
Sources close to the search committee say that Summer's close ties to Harvard's undergraduate population - stemming from his nearly ten years as a professor there - were among the chief reasons for his selection, according to The Boston Globe.
The economist was well regarded as treasury secretary under the Clinton administration. He served in that position for just over one year, after four years as deputy secretary and two years as undersecretary for international affairs.
When he left the White House with the rest of the Clinton administration, Summers became a fellow at the Brookings Institute, a renowned think tank. His position, however, came with no binding commitments.
Despite his many years spent in the political world, Summers is no stranger to academia. He graduated from MIT in 1975 and received his doctorate from Harvard. At age 28, he received the distinction of becoming Harvard's youngest tenured professor. He served as a domestic policy economist on the President's Council of Economic Advisers and, in 1993, won the John Bates Clark Medal, presented every two years to the most outstanding American economist under the age of 40. He also served as chief economist for the World Bank from 1991 to 1993.
Summers was one of four finalists identified by Harvard's search committee. Initially, many media outlets had focused on University of Michigan President Lee C. Bollinger as the front-runner for the job. The Harvard Independent even ran a profile of Bollinger in its most recent issue, with the explanation that "The Harvard Independent, working in collaboration with the Michigan Daily, has received information... [that] leads us to believe [that Bollinger] will be the next president."
But Bollinger was not the only candidate being seriously considered, as The Daily Princetonian reported in a Feb. 6 article that Princeton Professor Amy Gutmann was "at the top of [the] list" of Harvard's candidates.
Now that the Harvard community knows for sure that Summers will be its next leader, many have expressed their approval.
"I think he'll do a pretty good job," Harvard sophomore Kate Greenthal said. "Although he has been in politics in the past few years, he was in academia before."
However, one student organization, the Harvard Progressive Student Labor Movement, was not so happy with the selection and plans to protest the nomination of Summers because of economic policies he supported while serving working at the World Bank.
Though various media outlets have been following the search closely, Greenthal did not feel as though Harvard students were very interested in the process. "In general I don't think students have been following it," she said.
When Harvard began its search for a new president, a number of media groups said that other presidential searches would have to take a back seat until the nation's most storied institution made its selection.
