Former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence H. Summers has been recommended by the Harvard presidential search committee as the 27th president of the University.

Members of the Board of Overseers--who must give consent for the final choice to be official--have not yet approved the search committee's choice.

A formal announcement is planned within days. The Corporation has scheduled a meeting with the University deans for Monday.

Although speculation has focused on University of Michigan President Lee C. Bollinger in recent days, the search committee has debated between the two men for the past few weeks before finally settling on Summers.

Summers was appointed treasury secretary on July 2, 1999, after four years as deputy secretary and two years as undersecretary for international affairs, a post in which much of his focus was on international economic and financial policy.

Summers is currently a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank--a post he's held only since Clinton's departure in January.

When he took that post this year, he was appointed to an open-ended position--as opposed to the normal one-year appointments the institute makes.

Summers' post is completely open-ended and designed with the understanding that he is unsure of his long-term plans, Brookings' Director of Economic Studies Robert Litan has said.

Summers has always been a star in his field of economics: he was the youngest tenured professor at Harvard and in 1993 won the John Bates Clark Medal--given every two years to the outstanding American economist under the age of 40.

From 1983 to 1993, Summers was a professor of economics at Harvard University and from 1979 to 1982 was on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He served as a domestic policy economist on the President's Council of Economic Advisers from 1982 to 1983.

Summers graduated from M.I.T. in 1975, and earned his doctorate from Harvard in 1982. His wife, Victoria, is a tax attorney.