The Shleifer Scandal: The Final Straw
I gather from multiple sources that the most dramatic moment in yesterday's Harvard faculty meeting came when mechanical engineering professor Frederick H. Abernathy questioned Summers about the Andrei Shleifer scandal.
(
Marcella Bombardieri gets this right in the Globe, by the way, while Evan Jacobs and Anton Troianovski play it in the last graf of
their piece—an error in judgment, I think.)
After citing the university statement of values, Abernathy asked Summers about David McClintick's expose on the scandal in Institutional Investor magazine was correct.
(An expose, by the way, which the Globe has studiously ignored, perhaps because it was so utterly scooped. That the Globe did not run that story is a good example of why the Globe is a mediocre newspaper.)
When Summers claimed that he had recused himself—a claim no one at Harvard believes, except (one wonders) perhaps Summers himself—Abernathy repeated his desire for Summers' opinion.
Summers, I am told, claimed that he "
did not know any of the facts in the matter." (A verbatim quotation.)
That response produced an audible gasp of shock and disbelief from the faculty. As one e-mailer put it to me, "The president lied in a bold-faced fashion...."
I suspect that this claim on Summers' part is going to be very problematic for him; it simply defies credulity. It is a lie. And just as the American president can not lie to the public, the Harvard president can not lie to his faculty.
