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The American Economic Association banned former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers from membership for life on Tuesday, describing his conduct as “fundamentally inconsistent with its standards of professional integrity and with the trust placed in mentors within the economics profession.”
The expulsion, announced simultaneously with the AEA’s acceptance of Summers’ voluntary resignation from the group, is the latest and harshest consequence in the cascade of fallout over revelations about Summers’ long-running correspondence with convicted sex offender Jeffrey E. Epstein.
The AEA’s lifetime ban against Summers will bar him from participation in any of its events, editorial work, or referring activities — an extraordinary move for the field’s most influential scholarly body.
It follows the House Oversight Committee’s release of thousands of documents from Epstein’s estate — which included messages showing that Summers confided in Epstein until one day before Epstein’s arrest on new sex trafficking charges in 2019. Summers repeatedly asked Epstein for advice on his pursuit of a younger economist, describing her as a mentee.
“She must be very confused or maybe wants to cut me off but wants professional connection a lot and so holds to it,” Summers wrote in one March 2019 message to Epstein.
Over seven months, Epstein workshopped Summers’ messages and advised on the tone and posture of his interactions, calling himself Summers’ “wing man.” The two men also joked about the probability that Summers would have sex with the woman, referring to her by the code name “peril.”
The AEA wrote in Tuesday’s statement that its determination was based on Summers’ conduct as “reflected in publicly reported communications.” The statement said that the AEA would not comment further on its decision, citing confidentiality rules that it said bar any further discussion of its rationale or processes.
The publication of Summers’ exchanges with Epstein forced Summers, a former United States Treasury Secretary who holds Harvard’s highest faculty distinction as a University Professor, into a rapid retreat from public life.
Over the last two weeks, he has stepped back or been removed from roles at Bloomberg, The New York Times, OpenAI, the Center for American Progress, and the Group of 30. Summers also announced last month he would step down from his role as an instructor at Harvard and as the director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School.
But the AEA’s Tuesday announcement is perhaps the sharpest institutional rebuke that Summers has faced so far, marking him as a persona non grata in a discipline where he has spent his career as a prolific scholar and high-flying public intellectual.
Summers acknowledged in a statement to The Crimson last month that continuing communications with Epstein was “misguided,” adding that he was “ashamed” and understood “the pain” caused by his actions.
He did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the AEA’s Tuesday decision.
—Staff writer Dhruv T. Patel can be reached at dhruv.patel@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @dhruvtkpatel.
—Staff writer Cam N. Srivastava can be reached at cam.srivastava@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @camsrivastava.
