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“A major error in judgment”: That’s how disgraced Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers just described his “association” with the late sex fiend Jeffrey Epstein, who donated a cool $9.1 million to Harvard while Summers was president and gave $110,000 more to a poetry nonprofit founded by the awkward Ivy League economist’s second wife.
Summers, who also led Barack Obama’s National Economic Council and was a senior World Bank official, feels “deeply ashamed.”
His shame runs so deep, he stayed in regular contact with Epstein for 11 years after the perv’s 2008 conviction for soliciting sex from a minor.
They texted just the day before Epstein’s 2019 arrest for sex-trafficking minors on a mass scale.
Before Epstein landed in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he was soon found dead in what was ruled a suicide, he and Summers talked about Donald Trump, whom both detested, and swapped low opinions of women’s intelligence.
They had heart-to-hearts about Summers’ foundering pursuit of a purportedly inconstant younger woman he called his “mentee” and bantered about the (low) mathematical probability she would sleep with him again.
In perhaps the century’s worst romantic metaphor, Epstein described himself in this monthslong drama as Summers’ “wing man.”
Summers’ last text to the doomed pedophile vented that his vacationing family members reminded him of dysfunctional characters in an Ibsen play.
The friendship was long, but Summers’ downfall was swift. Trump asked the Justice Department to investigate him, President Clinton, Democrat megadonor Reid Hoffman, JPMorgan Chase and “many other people and institutions” he thinks may be implicated in the massive trove of Epstein documents released this month — even as Summers’ fellow Dems combed them in vain for dirt on Trump.
Within hours, the cancel-culture machine set the sad Ivy League veteran on the path to ruin.
The Brookings Institution, the Center for American Progress, the Center for Global Development and Budget Lab at Yale all cut ties with Summers.
He resigned from OpenAI’s board.
The New York Times solemnly declared it wouldn’t renew his contributing-writer contract when it expires at year’s end.
Harvard announced he will “step back” from his high-profile teaching gig and stand down as director of a business-study center.
And Friday, uber-woke hedge fund D.E. Shaw fired him from his lucrative consulting gig, The Post exclusively reported.
Being chummy with a sex offender is a bad look for today’s public intellectual, but there’s no evidence (at least not yet) Summers participated in any of Epstein’s criminal or morally questionable activities — though records reveal he and his wife visited Epstein’s private island during their Caribbean honeymoon.
All he appears to have done was keep up a bizarre relationship with a sketchy correspondent whom wiser people — like Donald Trump — cut off even before Epstein’s criminal conviction.
Having failed to own up to it, Summers is suffering after being outed in a political document dump way beyond his control.
The reality runs deeper, however.
Summers is the son of two Ivy League professors and nephew of two Nobel laureates. He had every advantage in life and enjoyed a meteoric rise through elite academia.
His government service elevated him to cabinet rank and landed him the presidency of arguably the world’s most prestigious university — all before he was 50.
But in consenting to his own cancellation in a culture that demands blood even for minor slipups, unproved accusations and unfortunate associations, he may have only himself to blame.
Twenty years ago, when “cancel culture” was almost totally unknown and leftist intolerance remained an amusing campus quirk rather than academia’s dominant ideology, then-Harvard prez Summers speculated in off-the-record remarks that women might be less adept at science than men.
He introduced the idea as a provocation he hoped wasn’t true and offered alternative views.
An early version of the mob came for him anyway, with the Harvard faculty narrowly voting a “lack of confidence” in his leadership.
Back then, Summers could have stood his ground. He could have used his obvious intelligence and his position’s immense prestige to fight back and stand up for free speech and inquiry — for himself and everyone else.
He could have told the identity-politics fascists to stuff it.
He could have argued — to a student body that supported him by more than three to one — it’s not colleges’ role to police constitutionally protected language and behavior.
He could have moved on without comment and let his critics sulk in impotent silence.
But he did none of these things. He resigned, offering a flurry of self-abasing apologies as he followed a grasping path to rehabilitation within a system that despised him then and despises him now.
Last month, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni gave Summers an award for “outstanding contributions to liberal arts education.”
Who knows if it will be revoked because he moronically took dating advice from Jeffrey Epstein?
But the biggest of his illustrious “contributions” looks like opening the ivory tower’s gates to the cancel-culture furies.
In allowing that, he failed himself, he failed Harvard, he failed higher education, and he failed America. Ultimately, that is the tragedy of Lawrence Summers.
Paul du Quenoy is Palm Beach Freedom Institute president.