The president of Harvard University has announced his resignation after a turbulent five years and a week ahead of a second no-confidence vote.
Lawrence Summers lost the first vote in March last year after suggesting women had less "intrinsic aptitude" than men for science.
The ex-Treasury secretary, whose tenure is the briefest in 140 years, will leave at the end of this academic year.
He said the rift with some staff made his agenda of renewal "infeasible".
Dr Summers' controversial leadership style has divided opinion at the Ivy League university.
His comments on gender, for which he repeatedly apologised, led the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to pass the no-confidence vote last March.
There are those in some departments of American collegiate Arts & Sciences that seem to know as little of free speech as any anti-Danish rampaging horde.
1 comment:
From the reading I've done on this, I've gotten the impression that Summers had the social skills of a cranky hermit. You know how academics are--egos need massaging, no matter what political creed they follow. From what I've read, he'd earned many an enemy with a blunt-force management style, one that managed to show contempt for any of the politics of academia, or for deparmental power structures. What this resulted in, practically, was a series of sharpened axes, looking for the moment when he exposed his neck.
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