University President Lawrence H. Summers has signed his autograph on the dollar bill and had his name printed in headlines across the world, but it is his face, plastered on a red T-shirt, that may best symbolize what the president means to Harvard students.

This spring, while faculty members and the national media assailed Summers for his January comments on the representation of women in the sciences, the embattled Summers found support from a more youthful cohort: Harvard’s undergraduates.

It was during the imbroglio that a group of Summers supporters printed T-shirts parodying the popular Che Guevara “Viva La Revolution!”, with Summers’ scowling face above the phrase: “Viva El Presidente Summers!”

A veritable celebrity upon his arrival, Summers has enjoyed treatment worthy of a rock star at Harvard, complete with fancy escorts, a bevy of spokespeople, T-shirts, websites, paparazzi, and the chants of screaming fans at football games and outside Faculty meetings.

As the Class of 2005 prepares to commence, Summers, too, is passing a milestone. He is presiding over the graduation of the first students to be educated entirely under his administration.

Summers was inaugurated as this class was first ushered into the Yard. And this semester, Summers and the Class of 2005 both sought to gain Faculty confidence: the former in his leadership style, the latter in their senior theses.

While most of today’s graduating seniors will not see the effects of two of the University’s biggest projects under Summers—the Harvard College Curricular Review and planning for expansion to Allston—the president’s initiatives, leadership style, and interaction with students have left an indelible mark on today’s Harvard graduates.

Love him or hate him—and many students would attest to the former—the controversial president is the subject of a strange fascination for many undergraduates.

He even seems to have bewildered his own children—at a recent interview, Summers said of the “Viva” T-shirts, with his signature smirk, “My children had never thought of me that way before.”

INTERACTION SATISFACTION

Summers’ supporters and detractors alike say the president has made a great effort to reach out to undergraduates and interact with them on a personal and academic level—much more so than his presidential predecessor, Neil L. Rudenstine.

“Rudenstine was a shy man in a lot of ways,” says Marcel A. Q. LaFlamme ’04-’05, who spent his freshman year under Rudenstine. This year, LaFlamme sat on the Coalition for an Anti-Sexist Harvard, an anti-Summers group established in response to the president’s January remarks at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

“[Rudenstine] was a lifelong academic promoted from within the ranks of the Harvard faculty, which is very different from President Summers,” LaFlamme says.

LaFlamme points to one crucial difference between the two presidents: Summers’ cult of personality among Harvard undergraduates can be traced back in part to his high-profile status.

Summers served as Chief Economist of the World Bank from 1991 to 1993 and served as Secretary of the Treasury from 1999 to 2000.