A wounded Summers fought to save his job. He apologized repeatedly, allocated millions to redress gender inequities on the faculty, and lobbied professors over breakfast at Elmwood, the president’s mansion. Summers had previously told advisers that he would not seek counsel from his predecessors, Bok and Rudenstine; he wanted to break from the past. Now he called both men—it was his first substantive conversation with Rudenstine since the beginning of his presidency.

In public the Corporation was unified in its support of Summers, but privately there were signs of strain. Rubin and Gray worried that the apologies were undermining Summers’s ability to govern. Reischauer and Rothenberg were coming to believe that Summers had a chronic management pathology destined to undermine his agenda. Harper became increasingly frustrated at Summers’s control over the board and attitude towards him personally. “Larry did not like Harper’s role on the board and more or less ignored him,” says a source familiar with Harper’s thinking. “Harper was marginalized.”

Harper also worried that Summers’s remarks on women put the president in a vulnerable legal position that could undercut his ability to perform one of the president’s most essential tasks. At Harvard, the president has final say on tenure nominations, something that is true at no other American university. But since Summers had voiced his opinion that biological differences might explain the underrepresentation of women in the sciences, could a female tenure candidate rejected by Summers sue him for gender discrimination? And if the president rejected a man for a job that went to a woman with similar qualifications, could the man sue for reverse discrimination? These were not implausible scenarios—Harvard has fought ugly lawsuits over tenure for lesser reasons—and to Harper they represented a potentially serious hindrance to Summers’s ability to do his job.

In July 2005, Summers lost an important ally when Gray retired. “The key was losing Hanna,” says one professor who knows both Gray and Summers well. “Hanna was like a wall—she blocked. She protected Larry from everything.”

Gray was the only woman and, other than Summers, the only academic on the board, and her replacement was expected to share those attributes; if Summers selected a fifth white male finance type, the Corporation risked becoming a parody of itself. So Summers chose former Wellesley and Duke president Nannerl Keohane. Much respected in academia, Keohane was a logical pick. But Keohane, now ensconced at Princeton, did not want the job, saying that she was too busy. So Summers did something that he would, in time, bitterly regret: Over the course of several conversations, he changed her mind.

Trouble soon resurfaced. On July 14th, Harper Fed-Exed Summers an astounding letter: He was resigning from the Corporation. Harper had clashed with Houghton and Gray about the fact that the Corporation intended to give Summers a raise from his 2004 compensation of $667,157. Summers’s “conduct . . . merits no raise whatsoever,” Harper insisted. When Houghton refused to allow Harper to bring up the issue at the Corporation’s annual summer retreat, Harper called it quits: “I told Jamie this afternoon that I would resign immediately . . . I cannot in good conscience remain a member of the Corporation when the procedures that should guide our deliberations are not followed.” At the end of his letter to Summers, Harper wrote, “I believe that Harvard’s best interests require your resignation.”

The incident was a powerful moment, not just because nothing like it had ever happened in the Corporation’s 350-year history, nor just because Harper’s public letter yanked back, if only for a moment, the curtain of secrecy on the board’s internal machinations. Harper’s resignation was more than a criticism of Summers. Suggesting that the board was squelching dissent and failing to fulfill its legal and fiduciary responsibilities to the university, it was an indictment of the Corporation itself, made all the more powerful by the fact that it came from one of the board’s own.

As the 2005–2006 school year approached, the situation was ominous. One governing board had become a hapless side show; the other appeared stacked with the hop-to-it allies of a president whose ability to lead was slipping away. Harvard was on the brink of a constitutional crisis.

Behind the scenes, the Corporation was trying to stave off that crisis and save the Summers presidency. In the fall of 2005, the Corporation took an unprecedented step: To Summers’s manifest displeasure, the other fellows established performance benchmarks for the president as well as deadlines regarding the start date for a capital campaign and the reorganization of the Harvard Management Company, the university’s investment division. Its head, Jack Meyer, had resigned in part due to clashes with Summers. Those measures represented a crucial shift in the relationship between the president and the fellows: Summers was on notice.

The last straw came on January 27th of this year, when the Harvard Crimson broke the news that Summers had fired Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean William Kirby, whom he had hired less than four years earlier. That wasn’t a surprise to the Corporation: Summers had already informed the group of his intentions. But many FAS professors were livid. Though Kirby was not considered a strong dean, he was thought of as an honest and upright man who deserved better. The faculty’s anger eventually prompted a motion for a second vote of no confidence. On February 21, a week before the vote, Summers resigned.

But between the 7th and the 21st, the Corporation had swung into action. Isolated now, Summers and Rubin struggled to build support outside the FAS, calling professional-school deans such as the law school’s Elena Kagan. The other fellows worked the phones with members of the faculty, alumni, and various éminence grises, trying to assess whether Summers’s presidency was salvageable. Their conclusion: It was not, and Summers was sure to lose a second no-confidence vote. The next step was to consider how best to effect the president’s exit. Keohane and Reischauer were the most active conversants, and probably the first to believe that Summers’s presidency had become untenable. Rothenberg came next. Rubin would support Summers until the end.

Jamie Houghton was considered a forceful executive at Corning, but at Harvard people impressed with his leadership were hard to find. According to people who know him, Houghton was profoundly dismayed over the implosion of Summers’s presidency. Not only was it damaging Harvard, it was staining his own reputation. Seeking guidance, Houghton conferred with Stone, Bok, Rudenstine, and several professional-school deans. The message he heard, according to one source familiar with the conversations, was: “Start acting like a leader.”

On February 15th, Houghton told Summers that the board had withdrawn its support of the president. Over the next days, Summers, with the help of Rubin and Washington celebrity-lawyer Robert B. Barnett, negotiated his departure. First, he would finish out the year. Houghton had wanted Summers to leave immediately, but not everyone agreed. “You can’t just bring in a helicopter to take him away,” one Corporation member said, evoking the image of Richard Nixon leaving the White House. Summers would stay until July, after which he would receive a seven-figure severance package, take a year’s sabbatical, and return to Harvard as a University Professor. The position is Harvard’s highest-paying faculty post and cozy sinecure: it pays a $300,000 salary, with no formal obligation to teach. The value of Summers’s severance is said to be in the area of $2 million, which includes continued presidential salary, travel and entertainment expenses, rent for an apartment Summers keeps in Washington, and a small loan towards the purchase of a house. Along with his wife, Harvard English professor Elisa New, Summers moved out of Elmwood and bought a $2.5 million house on a 16,000-square-foot lot in Brookline, across the river. The severance will be spread out over several years to make its disclosure in Harvard’s annual tax releases more gradual and therefore less likely to draw attention.

Summers also won the right to issue a resignation letter blaming “segments of the Arts and Sciences faculty” for undermining his presidency. Finally, he extracted a promise that his speech at Commencement would be mailed to all Harvard alumni. That has not yet happened—apparently because no one involved wants to sign an accompanying cover letter. Some observers agreed with Summers’s assessment. In a recent issue of his magazine, New Republic owner Martin Peretz attacked the Corporation, and Nan Keohane in particular, for panicking in the face of “a variety of politicized social scientists and working-class-hero humanists” motivated by an “anti-Jewish animus” and “a certain strain of academic feminism.”

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