By Bhargav Acharya and Ryan Patrick Jones
Feb 25 (Reuters) – Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers on Wednesday said he will resign from teaching at Harvard University at the end of the academic year, amid the continuing fallout from his ties to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“I have made the difficult decision to retire from my Harvard professorship at the end of this academic year,” Summers said in a statement.
Summers, also a former president of Harvard, has been under fire since the U.S. House Oversight Committee released documents detailing an ongoing personal correspondence between Summers and Epstein. No evidence of wrongdoing by Summers has surfaced.
Summers discontinued teaching roles at Harvard and went on leave as a director of a business and government school at the university in November after the university said it would conduct a review of people named in the Epstein files.
“In connection with the ongoing review by the University of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein that were recently released by the government, Harvard Kennedy School Dean Jeremy Weinstein has accepted Professor Lawrence H. Summers’ resignation from his leadership position as co-director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government,” Harvard spokesperson Jason Newton said in a statement.
Newton said Summers would remain on leave until he retires from his academic and faculty positions at Harvard at the end of the school year.
Summers also resigned in November from the board of OpenAI, the developer of the ChatGPT artificial intelligence tool, after Harvard announced its review.
Summers said then he was “deeply ashamed” of his actions and said he would step back from public commitments to “repair relationships with the people closest to me.”
(Reporting by Costas Pitas in Los Angeles, Ryan Patrick Jones and Bhargav Acharya in Toronto; Editing by Daphne Psaledakis, Michelle Nichols and Caitlin Webber)
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