The scandals will have a variety of curricular impacts, Summers said—the full extent of which have yet to emerge. But Summers said that “the real lesson of Enron and the like is not the need for more ethics courses,” but the need for “the creation of habits of mind and culture, where people who have questions about something feel free to raise them.”

Summers said that despite the slumping stock market, Harvard is financially in much the same place as it was earlier this year.

Since he arrived as president, Summers said, he has cautioned that Harvard must act conservatively on financial matters.

“From the time I came I have felt that we needed to make sure we were planning on a very conservative basis that did not assume any of the remarkable returns on the endowment we enjoyed during much of the 1990s,” Summers said. “Nothing has happened that has caused me to deviate from those judgments.”

This year, the University’s undergraduate and professional schools received only a 2 percent increase in endowment payout, and Summers said he has told deans to expect payouts in a similar range for the next several years.

Some years during the 1990s the endowment payouts rose by as much as 20 percent, though a more typical annual increase was closer to 7 percent.

According to Summers, the continuing stock market woes only underscore the need for fiscal discipline and have not pushed schools into crisis situations.

“The University’s finances and endowment have fared well in a relative sense over this period,” Summers said.

“Certainly [the endowment’s] performance has been far, far better than that of the broad stock market…and it has fared relatively well compared to other schools,” he said.

—Staff writer David H. Gellis can be reached at gellis@fas.harvard.edu.