But sometimes the two-hour seminars wore on students.

“He’s not the most animated speaker,” one student recalls. “You could definitely zone out a bit, especially when we’d do the math, and after two hours sitting in the same chair. But there’s no question in my mind that he is the smartest person I have ever met in my life.”

The Last Supper

Even after a whole semester of writing response papers and going head to head with Summers, students say he still catches them off guard with his occasional name dropping.

As Quigley prepares to turn in her paper today, she admits that she is “a little nervous.”

The pressure was on when the Saskatchewan native—who is writing a paper about her provincial government—met with Summers to discuss her topic.

“When I went in for my meeting, we started talking about our new prime minister, Paul Martin, who is good friends with President Summers,” Quigley recalls. “And he goes, ‘Well, if your paper is good enough, I might send it to Paul.’”

Summers has told the class that he will spend all of Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend at his Elmwood home reading the final papers.

And the pressure is on for the other students in the class as well, many of whom are hoping to get a recommendation from Harvard’s president.

After the final seminar, held over pizza at Elmwood last Monday night, students lingered to discuss their papers—and the possibility of changing Harvard’s exam schedule so that exams would take place before winter break.

Summers was noncommittal, but students rode the shuttle bus back to the Yard with the hope that exams might someday fall in December, and future students in Summers’ seminars might be sending in their papers a few weeks earlier.

“He told us that we’d have to have a strong campus consensus for it to happen, but that it could happen as early as our senior year,” Bi says.

—Staff writer Lauren A.E. Schuker can be reached at schuker@fas.harvard.edu.