L Summers was famous for 2 things in my memory.
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Summers also served as the 27th President of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006. Summers resigned as Harvard's president in the wake of a no-confidence vote by Harvard faculty that resulted in large part from Summers' conflict with Cornel West, financial conflict of interest questions regarding his relationship with Andrei Shleifer, and a 2005 speech in which he suggested that the under-representation of women in science and engineering could be due to a "different availability of aptitude at the high end," and less to patterns of discrimination and socialization
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Saying women are different rattled the feminists and social justice crowd.
He also clobberd Harvard's investments with some unwise and high risk speculation.
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During Summers' presidency at Harvard, the University entered into a series totalling US$3.52 billion of interest rate swaps, financial derivatives that can be used for either hedging or speculation.[39] Summers approved the decision to enter into the swap contracts as president of the university and as a member of Harvard Corp., "the university’s seven-member ruling body" which bears "the school’s ultimate fiduciary responsibility."[40] By late 2008, those positions had lost approximately $1 billion in value. This forced Harvard to borrow significant sums in distressed market conditions to meet margin calls on the swaps.[41] In the end Harvard paid $497.6 million in termination fees to investment banks and has agreed to pay another $425 million over 30–40 years.[40] The decision to enter into the swap positions has been attributed to Summers and has been termed a "massive interest-rate gamble" that ended badly.[42]
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Summers
The social justice agenda suffered a setback.
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