Lawrence Summers’s Due Process

The departure from Harvard of its 27th president, Lawrence Summers, is hardly an occasion for celebration. The former secretary of the Treasury, currently on leave, will resign from his academic and faculty appointments at the end of the year. The departure is due to the disclosure of his warm relationship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. Mr. Summers has not been charged with a crime, or even accused of one. Mr. Summers’s fate puts into sharp relief how the en masse release of the so-called “Epstein Files” has run roughshod over due process. The Crimson calls the cascade of retreats an “extraordinary unraveling for Summers, long one of the most influential figures in American economics.” It requires carrying no brief for either Epstein or Mr. Summers, though, to be shocked at the lack of due process afforded to Mr. Summers and others. Mr. Summers is hardly alone in facing fallout from the files, which have caused an earthquake among the elite. On Thursday, the president of the World Economic Forum, Borge Brende, resigned. In England, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and the erstwhile ambassador to America, Peter Mandelson, both face the possibility of charges. The Clintons are being deposed in Congress this week, though they too have not been accused of any crime.These columns have defended Mr. Summers before. In an address at Memorial Church in 2002, he warned that “profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities.” He declared that while he had “been put off by those who heard the sound of breaking glass, in every insult or slight, and conjured up images of Hitler’s Kristallnacht at any disagreement with Israel,” those dismissals proved too glib.Four years ago Mr. Summers revisited that speech in these pages, writing that at Harvard “antisemitism is being practiced in both intent and effect.” He added that “not identifying and attacking antisemitism in our midst would be a major moral failing.” In those early days of the Russia-Ukraine war he asked “Apart from raw animus against the Jewish State, how could any thoughtful person today regard Russia and Israel on the same plane?”It’s not our intention to plead special treatment for Mr. Summers on the basis of his past positions. We have plenty of differences with the economist. Just as the outcry that led to his departure as Harvard’s president seemed thin as a basis for defenestration, though, so too does the existence of a friendship, however awkward so far, with Epstein. Mr. Summers is simply owed what every American is — the presumption of innocence.

Lawrence Summers’s Due Process

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