CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – When Harvard’s faculty unexpectedly voted “no confidence” in the university’s president, Lawrence Summers, the man who made the motion was a professor, J. Lorand Matory, who is little known outside his field of anthropology.

Who is this academic who unleashed a process that may yet drive Mr. Summers from the Harvard presidency?

Mr. Matory, 43, is a self-described “compulsive workaholic,” who learned to play the violin a few years ago to accompany his children, who are learning the Suzuki method.

Mr. Matory’s scholarship, which has focused on African and African-American cultures, criticizes some nationalist and feminist scholars of those cultures as biased against homosexuals. “Homophobia is a common adjunct of nationalism,” he wrote in a 2003 article published in the journal Gender & History.

He grew up in Washington, D.C., the son of a surgeon and a politically active clinical psychologist, and entered Harvard as an undergraduate at age 16.

His wife, Bunmi Fatoye-Matory, once served as a protocol officer under President Babandiga of Nigeria.

In 1981, as a Harvard student, he was prosecuted criminally for an alleged date rape. A jury found him not guilty.

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Precisely how did Mr. Matory, who holds a joint professorship in anthropology and African and African-American studies, wind up as the author and sole sponsor of the no-confidence measure that passed by a 218-to-185 vote of the faculty?

The only Harvard professor other than Mr. Matory to have made a public call for Mr. Summers’s resignation, Daniel Fisher, said Mr. Matory stepped up after an attempt to organize a similar joint motion by six to ten faculty members fizzled a few weeks earlier. “A large fraction of them withdrew their names because of concerns about their spouses or department heads,” said Mr. Fisher, a physics professor. “Not many faculty who think that have been willing to say it publicly…. I have a lot of admiration for him on this,” Mr. Fisher said of Mr. Matory.

In an interview with The New York Sun last week, Mr. Matory said he did not believe his efforts demonstrated any special courage. “I’m no more or less a coward than anybody else,” Mr. Matory said. “There are dozens of people who fear being insulted, fear losing their jobs, have been told they can’t speak out on issues that Mr. Summers has spoken out on…. Other people are scared, but frankly, I feel that I and the institution I love have more to lose in the long term by our being quiet than by our insisting that this matter receives a fair discussion.”

An “explanatory note” that Mr. Matory circulated in advance of the faculty meeting offered his reasons for speaking out against Mr. Summers. The note complained about Mr. Summers’s January comments suggesting that women might be innately less capable of groundbreaking research in math and science. But it also mentioned a memo Mr. Summers signed in 1991 suggesting that it might be economically beneficial to dump toxic waste in the third world. It seemed to fault Mr. Summers for his welcome of military recruiters and the Reserve Officers Training Corps to the Harvard campus. And it complained about Mr. Summers’s statement that he detected anti-Semitism in an effort to persuade Harvard and other schools to divest from Israel.

“We remain concerned about the substance of Mr. Summers’ apparently ongoing convictions about the capacities and rights not only of women but also of African Americans, third-world nations, gay people, and colonized peoples,” the note drafted by Mr. Matory said. “The assembled faculty wish officially to register dissent from Mr. Summers’ stated opinions regarding the innate capacities of subordinate populations, the wisdom of dumping in third-world nations, the authorized presence on campus of organizations that infringe upon the equal rights of gay people, and the proposition that the criticism of Israeli military policy toward the Palestinians is inherently anti-Semitic.”

After consulting with other critics of Mr. Summers, Mr. Matory dropped the note and pared his motion down to just: “The Faculty lacks confidence in the leadership of Lawrence H. Summers.”

Mr. Matory’s streamlined motion brought many more of Mr. Summers’s critics on board and likely gave the motion its margin of victory at the March 15 faculty meeting.

Mr. Matory said the decision to withdraw the original language was not primarily one of strategy. “I’m not a politician. I’m a straight shooter,” he said. Instead, Mr. Matory said, the motion was redrafted because the grievances against Mr. Summers turned out to be too numerous to catalog.

“I was getting calls and e-mails from deans, from staff, that is to say administrative staff, people were approaching me in the dental clinic, at University Health Services, everybody had a different complaint. Everybody had a story of some moment when they felt really, really disrespected by Mr. Summers,” Mr. Matory said. “They feel as though they’ve been treated like dirt.”

Mr. Matory said he dropped the explanatory note because “this particular issue was not about me.”

However, Mr. Fisher said the early wording actually could have cost Mr. Matory votes. “It would have backfired. It had much too much political stuff in it,” Mr. Fisher said.

A professor of law who opposed the effort to censure Mr. Summers, Alan Dershowitz, gave Mr. Matory credit for the move. “The guy got smart and he took out those three specifics in order to try to cobble together a coalition of angry feminists, angry anti-Israeli people and angry leftists in general,” Mr. Dershowitz said.

Mr. Matory acknowledged one key factor in his decision to challenge Mr. Summers that was not mentioned directly in the explanatory note he submitted in early March: the 2001 confrontation between Mr. Summers and a Harvard professor, Cornel West.

In a tense meeting, Mr. Summers reportedly chastised Mr. West for letting his scholarship and teaching suffer while devoting time and energy to performing on a hip-hop CD and advising Democratic presidential candidates Bill Bradley and Rev. Al Sharpton. Mr.West left Harvard for Princeton the following year.

“This practice of a person who enters an institution in a leadership role and in order to strike fear into the hearts of anybody chooses some public and vulnerable figure to beat up on very publicly to scare anybody else out of saying anything or resisting the agendas of the new leader, I just – I’ve long believed that’s not how the life of the mind in the university ought to work,” Mr. Matory said. “Mr. Summers called a colleague of ours into his office and told him things that are unthinkable within the practices of the academy.”

Mr. Matory also termed “very important” his disagreement with Mr. Summers over the issue of divestment from Israel. “To my mind this is a very modest suggestion that has reasons for it and reasons against it which we should all discuss publicly and civilly. To me, there was not a shred of anti-Semitism in it,” said Mr. Matory, who signed a petition calling on Harvard to divest from Israel and from American companies selling arms to Israel.

Mr. Matory said Mr. Summers’s suggestion that supporters of the petition were “anti-Semitic in their effect, if not their intent” was wildly unfair. “It had nothing to do with a series of events that Mr. Summers compared it to. He compared it to knocking over Jewish headstones. He compared it to violent assaults against perfectly innocent Jewish people in Western Europe. To me, the comparison is obscene.”

Mr. Summers declined to be interviewed for this article.

Some faculty members were a bit surprised to find Mr. Matory leading the charge against Mr. Summers.

“He’s not one of the commonly heard voices around here when political battles are fought,” said a fellow professor of anthropology, Peter Ellison. “Randy’s a scholar. He’s not sort of tried to promote himself as a public intellectual with a broader agenda. You won’t find him authoring things in the New York Review of Books.”

Mr. Matory acknowledged that he had not spent much time in the past publicly debating the direction of the university. “I’m pretty much 100% committed to scholarship and 100% committed to my family,” he said. “I’ve been a compulsive workaholic when it comes to my scholarship and I get my work done.”

Fellow academics describe Mr. Matory as a first-rate scholar and a tireless worker. He’s learned French, Spanish, Portugese, and the African language of Yoruba, and his curriculum vitae runs to 14 pages.

“As a scholar, he has gilt-edged bona fides,” said Jean Comaroff, a professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago and Mr. Matory’s dissertation adviser. His dissertation, which was published as a book by the University of Minnesota Press, described the role of sexuality and gender in power structures in the Yoruba cultures of West Africa. “It’s really a very original piece of work that still stands today for its originality in the field,” Ms. Comaroff said.

Mr. Matory subsequently turned his attention to the relationships between African cultures and African-American cultures in Brazil and the Caribbean. “He puts these discourses, these regions into conversation with each other,” Ms. Comaroff said. “It’s that capacity that sets him apart.”

Harvard hired Mr. Matory as an assistant professor in 1991, the same year he received his Ph.D. He received tenure in 1998 without leaving Harvard, a move that remains uncommon.

“His record speaks for itself,” said Andrew Apter, a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles who shares some of Mr. Matory’s research interests and has known him for nearly 25 years. “He’s a very smart and interesting scholar. So, it’s unusual, but I think it was a good move on Harvard’s part…. He had counteroffers at the time so he could bargain. It’s not like he wasn’t in demand.”

One of Mr. Matory’s current projects is a book he is writing with his wife. According to Mr. Matory’s Web page, the “culturally-sensitive account… is intended both as a corrective to standardized journalistic and political science cliches about the nature of autocracy and corruption in Africa and as a historical study of the genesis of Nigeria’s current political crisis.”

His academic writings include passages such as this: “On the one hand, English-speaking North Americans tend to distinguish sharply between those men who engage in sex with other men (‘homosexuals’) and those who do not (‘heterosexuals’). On the other hand, Brazilians are far more likely to distinguish men who penetrate others during sexual intercourse (homens, or ‘[real] men’) from those who are penetrated (bichas, viados or, in Candomble language, ades). Brazilians share the basics of this pattern of classification with many peoples around the Mediterranean, as well as much of pre-nineteenth-century Europe, Native America and most of the rest of the world.”

That passage is taken from the 2003 article in Gender & History, titled “Gendered Agendas: The Secrets Scholars Keep About Yoruba-Atlantic Religion” that Mr. Matory assigns as reading for one of his Harvard classes. The article faulted one contemporary scholar for making a presentation with “logical and empirical inadequacies” and also singled out for criticism a pioneering feminist anthropologist, Ruth Landes, who died in 1991. Landes’s biographer, Sally Cole, who is a professor of anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal, reacted by saying that Mr. Matory’s article was “full of contradictions, confusion and bad writing.”

“Matory has a ‘gendered agenda’ of his own and he has not been forthright about it – although he does not hesitate to lambaste others,” Ms. Cole said.

At Harvard, Mr. Matory teaches an introduction to social anthropology, and a class on “Afro-Atlantic Religions” in which students can choose to have half of their grade based on an externship with a local priest.

Mr. Matory said he was too busy to grant an in-person interview for this article. He spoke to a reporter for the Sun by phone for about 40 minutes last week before saying he had to leave to prepare for a class.

A longtime friend of Mr. Matory, Christina Gomez, said she wasn’t surprised to read of his prominence in the fight against Mr. Summers.

“I have never seen him not speak out when he has felt it was necessary,” said Ms. Gomez, a sociology professor at Northeastern Illinois University who met Mr. Matory while the two were graduate students at Chicago. “Randy Matory is a very intelligent, eloquent, brilliant professor. Harvard is lucky to have him. He’s also one of the most honest people I know.”

Mr. Matory grew up in Washington, D.C. His father, William Matory, is chairman of the District of Columbia Board of Medicine and a professor of surgery emeritus at Howard University. The Harvard professor’s mother, Deborah Matory, was a clinical psychologist who oversaw handicapped services for the city’s public schools. She was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1976, and she died in 1995. His parents divorced in 1971.

“I grew up in a Washington where black people were the most comfortable and the least comfortable, the smartest and the dumbest, the meanest and the nicest, where I was just a human being,” Mr. Matory said. “I’ve always put a lot of pressure on myself to achieve, to do the right thing. I’m not rich. My family was professional; we never had a lot of money. The only thing I had was my good name.”

Mr. Matory’s sister, Yvedt, is a breast cancer surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and an assistant professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School. She is married to Randall Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law School.

In an interview, William Matory described his son as “strong-willed and very genuine.”

“He doesn’t mind facing the waves,” Dr. Matory said. “I’ve disagreed with him on a number of family issues only to find that he was right.”

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While the battle with Mr. Summers is the most recent conflict Mr. Matory has been involved in at Harvard, it is not the only one.

In the mid-1990s, Mr. Matory and his wife lived in an apartment in a Harvard undergraduate dorm, Leverett House. Mr. Matory said “some friction” developed between himself and a staffer in the house over a variety of issues related to his responsibilities as a rent-paying faculty member living there.

Mr. Matory said that soon after he moved out of the dorm in 1998, he sent the house a rather routine request to continue his affiliation with the dorm as a non-resident.

“A few days later, I get a letter saying given your lack of cooperation at the time we were trying to move someone else into the apartment, it’s clear you’re not really interested in an affiliation. So, no thank you,” Mr. Matory said. He said he was outraged.

“I’ve been around here a long, long time. Nobody ever treated me that way,” Mr. Matory said. He complained to the then-dean of the college, Harry Lewis, who asked another dean, Archibald Epps III, to mediate the dispute.

Mr. Lewis did not return a call seeking comment for this article. Epps died in 2003. During the inquiry, Mr. Matory gathered letters from other professors attesting to his character, a person involved in the matter said. Mr. Matory said his race may have played a role. Efforts by the Sun to locate the staffer involved were unsuccessful.

Ultimately, Mr. Matory said, the incident ended with him receiving letters of apology.

The master of Leverett House referred questions about the matter to a Harvard spokesman, who offered no information about the incident.

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Mr. Matory is now a leader of the effort against Mr. Summers, an effort spurred by Mr. Summer’s comments about women. Leverett House was also the site of another conflict about treatment of women – or one woman – that landed Mr. Matory on newspaper front pages. It was in his dorm room there, in February 1981, that he had an encounter with a Wellesley sophomore, Regina Newton, that she and prosecutors charged was rape. She had met Mr. Matory a couple of weeks earlier through one of his cousins, who was also a Wellesley student. Ms. Newton had come to the Harvard campus that night to watch a choral performance by a group Mr. Matory belonged to, the Kuumba Singers.

From the outset, Mr. Matory maintained that he was innocent. He acknowledged having sex with Ms. Newton, but insisted it was consensual.

The weeklong trial, held in Cambridge the following October, generated stories in the Harvard Crimson and the Boston Globe. A jury of eight men and four women deliberated for three hours before finding Mr. Matory not guilty, the newspapers reported.

Asked about the case in an interview last week, Mr. Matory said, “A quarter of a century ago, when I was 20 years old, I was falsely accused and a jury of 12 people unanimously and quickly said I was not guilty.”

In a Crimson story reporting his acquittal, Mr. Matory was quoted as saying, “This case was an ethical injustice….There is something wrong with a judicial system where it is only necessary for one party to allege something to make a case.”

A former dean of students at Wellesley, Florence Ladd, sat through much of the trial. “I remember that Harvard marshaled all of its forces,” Florence Ladd told the Sun. Ms. Ladd, a Cambridge resident who later headed a women’s research center at Radcliffe College, the Bunting Institute, said “a phalanx” of Harvard people attended the trial.

Ms. Ladd, who supported the accuser, expressed the opinion that the outcome of the trial was affected by “the power of Harvard and the hegemony of male values at that time.”

Ms. Ladd said that since Mr. Matory came back to Cambridge as a professor he and his wife have attended social events in her home but that until being interviewed by the Sun, she never made the connection to the trial. “Is that Randy Matory? It is? I adore Randy Matory,” she said.

Ms. Ladd said she recently sent Mr. Matory a note congratulating him for taking on Mr. Summers. “Oh, my gosh. The plot thickens, doesn’t it?” she said before adding, “Certainly, I wouldn’t retract anything I have said.”

The Crimson reported that the senior tutor at Leverett House, Thomas Dingman, testified at the trial as a character witness for Mr. Matory. Mr. Dingman described the Harvard senior as “truthful” and “peaceful,” the student newspaper said.

Mr. Dingman, now an associate dean of the college, declined to be interviewed for this article.

Today, there is no definitive public record of the trial, which took place in Middlesex Superior Court. According to a clerk, court files on the trial were sealed in 1999. No mention of the case appears in the court’s public indices. A spokeswoman for the Middlesex district attorney’s office, Melissa Sherman, said she does not believe that the prosecutor’s office was notified when the file was sealed. “My understanding is we are supposed to receive notification and it doesn’t appear we did,” she said.

Cambridge District Court records do show that on March 31, 1981, Mr. Matory pleaded not guilty to charges of rape and indecent assault and battery. About ten days later, a judge found probable cause to proceed on the rape charge and sent the case to superior court to be considered by a grand jury.

In a recent interview, the lawyer who prosecuted Mr. Matory, Gillian Pearson, said she remembers the case “very vividly.” However, Ms. Pearson, who is now the executive director of the Massachusetts Judicial Conduct Commission, declined to discuss the trial in detail. She cited a state law that limits prosecutors’ ability to make public comments about criminal cases.

A prominent Boston attorney who defended Mr. Matory at the trial, Norman Zalkind, sharply criticized the district attorney’s office for bringing the case. “It was a baseless case. It was based on nothing. It should never have been brought,” he said.

Asked why prosecutors chose to go forward, Mr. Zalkind said, “This is Cambridge. We’re talking advanced on women’s rights.”

Mr. Zalkind said Harvard stayed out of the trial. After the acquittal, Harvard took no action against Mr. Matory, he and others with knowledge of the matter said. He graduated from the university in June 1982, on time, with a B.A., magna cum laude in anthropology.

Less than a decade passed before Mr. Matory applied to Harvard for a position as a junior professor of anthropology. (He spent the time in between teaching at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and earning a Ph.D, which included research in Nigeria supported by a Fulbright-Hays fellowship.) The panel that considered his appointment in 1991 discussed the rape case, one professor in the group said. The professor, who asked not to be identified, said Harvard’s file on the matter was requested from the then dean of the college, John Fox Jr., but he rebuffed the request.

In a brief phone interview last week, Mr. Fox, who is now retired, declined to discuss the matter.

Mr. Matory said he learned only long after he got the job that his history as a Harvard undergraduate had been a subject of discussion. “I found it out years later because, as you know, it was an utterly unambiguous case. If they thought there was any ambiguity about it, I wouldn’t have been hired, much less given tenure,” he said. “There was nothing ambiguous about it and everybody knew it then. Everybody knows it now. It was a false accusation. I was innocent. And that’s it.”

The alleged victim in the case, Ms. Newton, remains disappointed by the trial’s results. Until she was contacted by the Sun, she was unaware that Mr. Matory had returned to Harvard as a professor. Ms. Newton, 44, who lives in Baton Rouge, said she had heard of the effort to oust Mr. Summers, but did not know Mr. Matory was leading the charge. “All I can say, he’s got nerve. He’s got nerve, but he had nerve then,” she said.

After the disputed encounter with Mr. Matory, Ms. Newton took off the rest of the spring semester. “I literally fell apart,” she said. Ms. Newton, a political science major, returned to Wellesley that fall, but didn’t manage to earn all the credits she needed. She was finally awarded her bachelor’s degree by Wellesley in 2003.

Over the past two decades, Ms. Newton has moved frequently and held jobs as an actress and an HIV/AIDS educator. She is unemployed at present, she said.

The 1981 trial caused a falling out within Mr. Matory’s family, according to the cousin who introduced him and Ms. Newton, Patricia Wright. “It broke up my family, tore them completely in half,” she said, adding that the discord stemmed from the fact that she took Ms. Newton’s side.

Ms. Wright, who said she came in from Wellesley to pick up Ms. Newton on the night of the disputed encounter, said she had planned to testify against Mr. Matory at the trial. However, Ms. Wright said, she was in Africa at a family wedding when the trial took place. “I did not know until afterwards it was over,” she said.

Ms. Newton also said she had expected Ms. Wright to testify at the trial. In recent interviews, the two women said they lost contact and had not spoken with each other for more than 20 years.

When told by a reporter about Ms. Wright’s comments, Mr. Matory said, “I have no idea what she’s talking about.”

Mr. Matory’s father acknowledged that his son’s cousin and aunt backed Ms. Newton in the dispute. “I think they all felt very poorly about that,” William Matory said.

Asked whether the rape case against him had any influence on the way he approached the recent challenge to Mr. Summers, the professor who made the no confidence motion said, “I’ve always been distressed by untruth. Maybe, if anything, that rape trial renewed my faith that careful attention to evidence and to the rules of inference are the only stopgap we have to terrible unfairness in life. I mean careful attention to evidence and to the rules of logic don’t always guarantee fair outcomes, but without them we’re doomed to the power of bullies. Whoever is strongest will get his or her way and will get to rewrite history and tell us all what we should think. I’ve never been able to accept that.”