“If you look at the history of Harvard, there has always been a movement back and forth between those who have been more internal and more fundraisers,” Katz says, noting that the selection committee had clearly swung back toward the public model of university president.

Reischauer said the feedback he’s heard has been “highly positive.”

“And almost always in the form, ‘well it’s about time,’” Reischauer says. “Not with respect to Larry or Harvard, but with respect to the great universities of America coming out of their shells.”

MANICURING THE IMAGE

When he arrived in Cambridge, Summers said he had learned in Washington to temper his public opinions.

“You learned very quickly that the right way to handle things was to speak with restraint,” Summers said in 2001. “Being provocative and interesting wasn’t always good.”

While Summers understood that being secretary of the Treasury involved constant media scrutiny, it’s taken some time for him to adjust to the critical eye that many have aimed him at Harvard, Reischauer says.

“When you’re new in a job, you have to figure out how to ride the horse. I think he’s adapted quite well,” he says. “I think he realized very quickly that it’s very hard just to speak to the Harvard community without there being someone who’s going to take interest in it in the national media.”

Early on in his tenure, Summers drew fire for two high-profile incidents: a reported tiff with former Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West ’74 and his denouncement of the divestment movement.

Summers told the Wall Street Journal earlier this week that the divestment movement has fizzled since his morning prayers address.

“Over the last year and a half, since my speech, the divestment issue has faded away,” he said.

But Summers has tackled less controversial issues since the anti-Semitism flare-up, a trend he insists is entirely incidental.

At his morning prayers address this past September about the morality of economics, he noted that he intended to duck the hailstorm of controversy sparked by his previous morning prayers appearance.

“Whatever their merits, I think it fair to say that my observations [last year] did not go unnoticed,” he said. “I hope my remarks today will be cause for reflection but trust that that reflection will be rather more private and local than followed my remarks last year.”

Nonetheless, his outspokenness remains a difficult pill for many faculty to swallow.