At the time of his appointment, Summers was the University's youngest tenured professor, and former colleagues said he was unusually committed to nurturing junior faculty.

Midway through the search process--after Al Gore '69 lost the presidential election and Summers' days at Treasury seemed numbered--Abbe Professor of Economics Dale W. Jorgenson said he began to worry Summers' academic qualifications were being overshadowed by his political achievements.

As undersecretary and then secretary at Treasury, Summers worked on deficit reduction and revamping the Internal Revenue Service. He gained his greatest prominence for his work on China's accession to the World Trade Organization and on the U.S. financial bailout of Mexico and especially his handling of the Asian financial crisis.

"People were just focusing on that," Jorgenson said. "I had the impression that people needed to familiarize themselves with his academic background again."

So in January, Jorgenson wrote a letter to the search committee, detailing Summers' record as a recipient of prestigious academic prizes, including the 1993 John Bates Clark medal, an award given to an outstanding American economist under the age of 40. He wrote about Summers' "very busy" pace of research and instruction when he taught at the University and his important work in fields from labor issues to behavioral economics.

"You put all these things together and here's a guy who's a brilliant academic," Jorgenson said. "People needed to relearn what he was like in that role."

Many professors in the Economics Department are like Jorgenson--people who know Summers from graduate school, from his time as an assistant professor at MIT or his tenure as a Harvard professor.