I despise Larry Summers. As a professor, a president, an economist, and a person, I hate almost everything about him. Summers is a loudmouthed, condescending jerk, overflowing with idiotic, destructive, and bigoted ideas.

When Summers’s close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and his humiliating emails were revealed, it filled me with schadenfreude. And yet, Summers is still entitled to the protections of academic freedom—not because Summers is good, but because we need to defend the principle of academic freedom even when the professor in question is a scumbag.

It is important to note that, as always, Summers is not suffering nearly as much as his critics. The New York Times reported that Harvard is investigating students who dared to criticize Summers and to post his classroom comments on social media.

The students were initially accused of violating Harvard’s terrible anti-bullying policy (I’ve argued that no college should have anti-bullying policies). Perhaps realizing the mockery that would result by accusing students of “bullying” a tenured pedophile-friendly professor by accurately reporting his words, Harvard switched gears and instead is threatening to punish the students for attending a class they were not registered for, and recording a brief video of Summers.

In a statement, Harvard declared: “The College prohibits unauthorized recording of classroom proceedings to protect classrooms as spaces for intellectual exploration and risk-taking, to respect student privacy, and to prevent chilling effects that undermine participation and inquiry.” None of these were endangered by the video: It did not violate student privacy, it did not target any students, and it did not undermine any inquiry or exploration. It simply showed Summers’s statement to his students, which was a matter of intense public interest.

Although I strongly dislike students making secret recordings of their professors, I think they deserve criticism rather than discipline. Classrooms are not secret chambers, and announcements by professors are not private comments.

But the Harvard students were effective. The public outcry about Summers continuing to teach his class led Summers to quickly backtrack and withdraw. Embarrassing Harvard is the real “crime” here. But causing embarrassment is not a sound basis for punishment, whether we’re discussing Summers or these students.

So, let’s discuss Summers. Summers has been a fountain of terrible thoughts, arguing against lifesaving drugs for impoverished people, claiming that “underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted,” and formulating the Obama administration’s lousy response to the Bush Recession with inadequate stimulus and complete exoneration of the wealthy financial fraudsters who created it.

As an awful president of Harvard, Summers drove Cornel West out of Harvard and attacked his academic freedom, telling him that he could be “embarrassing” to Harvard if he engaged in politics and recorded rap albums.

It is ;commonly (but falsely) believed that Summers was forced out of the Harvard presidency because of his grotesque sexism in claiming that women were genetically inferior to men in intelligence, and that “intrinsic ability” rather than discrimination explained the lack of equity in academia. In the wake of Summers’s open bigotry against women, a vote of no confidence by the Liberal Arts and Science faculty passed narrowly by only a 218 to 185 vote. Summers easily survived this scandal with the full support of Harvard’s Board of Overseers who gave him a raise (and only one of them resigned in protest).

What ultimately brought down Summers were several mistakes that undermined support from his conservative base. First, he apologized for making his comments, which angered some right-wingers who wanted an unabashed defense of sexism.

Second, Summers was an imperious manager who alienated even his conservative supporters at Harvard. In 2003, Summers had ousted Dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences Harry Lewis, a figure beloved by conservatives at Harvard. In early 2006, the highly respected dean who followed Lewis, William Kirby, also resigned after conflicts with Summers, sparking more opposition.

Another key factor that led to Summers’s resignation was his scandal with Andrei Shleifer, Summers’s corrupt protege who profited from private investments while designing Russia’s privatization program for the U.S. government. After the government sued Harvard in 2000 for violating conflict-of-interest policies, Summers encouraged an endowed professorship to be given to Shleifer. Summers protected Shleifer as Harvard paid a $26.5 million settlement with the government and kept him in his tenured position. A lengthy expose of the Summers-Shleifer scandal was published in 2006 and copies were placed in every professor’s mailbox shortly before a second no-confidence vote was to be held; Summers resigned in February 2006 to avoid that vote, more than a year after his sexist comments had failed to end his career as president.

But the Epstein emails threaten to do to Summers what his bigotry never could: end his academic career.

On December 2, 2025, the American Economic Association (AEA) announced that Summers had voluntarily resigned from the AEA, but it nevertheless “imposed a lifetime ban on his membership” and added “a lifetime prohibition on Mr. Summers attending, speaking at, or otherwise participating in AEA-sponsored events or activities, including serving in any editorial or refereeing capacity for AEA journals.”

The AEA is wrong. Membership in an academic association is not evidence of moral virtue, and it should not be dependent upon moral judgments. Banning people from speaking at conferences is a form of deplatforming that all academic associations should reject on principle. In the unlikely event that Summers sought to speak at an academic conference, the best mechanism to challenge his offensive views and actions is to question and critique them, not to ban them. The standards of professional associations should be less stringent than college employment, because someone speaking at an academic conference has no position of power over anyone there.

But what about Summers’s employment at Harvard? Senator Elizabeth Warren, a former Harvard professor, declared: “If he had so little ability to distance himself from Jeffrey Epstein even after all that was publicly known about Epstein’s sex offenses involving underage girls, then Summers cannot be trusted to advise our nation’s politicians, policymakers, and institutions—or teach a generation of students at Harvard or anywhere else.” Guilt by association is always a bad standard to use for firing tenured professors. If professors can be fired for emailing terrible people, then they could also be fired for almost any kind of association with awful people or organizations.

Robert Kuttner of the American Prospect argued, “a professor who hits on students cannot be allowed in the same room with them, and thus is not fit to be a professor.” Kuttner later corrected this, because there was no student. Summers was hitting on a tenured professor at the London School of Economics whom he described as a “mentee.” Summers wrote to Epstein for dating advice: “She must be very confused or maybe wants to cut me off but wants professional connection a lot and so holds to it.” Summers nicknamed the woman “peril” (as in “yellow peril”) apparently because she is Chinese and he is racist.

Obviously, Summers is completely repulsive for trying to get sexual favors out of his influential position in the world of economics. But a distant mentor/mentee relationship is not the same as a professor abusing their authority over a student. Mentoring professors at other institutions is not part of a professor’s job description, and personal relationships with no connection to abuse of formal authority should not be regulated by colleges, even if they deserve complete condemnation.

I’ve always found it easy to hate Larry Summers, and it’s nice to see so many people joining the party now. But that well-justified hatred should not blind us to the danger of encouraging universities to fire faculty because they are controversial and unpopular. I would love to see Summers resign in disgrace. But I worry about giving Harvard administrators the power to dictate which professors and students they deem to be inconvenient to keep around.

Harvard has repeatedly suppressed free expression on campus, and now seeks to punish students who dared to denounce Summers. We need to demand that Harvard protect academic freedom for all, and not urge more violations of campus policies, not even for a lowlife like Larry Summers.