In the Globe, Tracy Jan chronicles the reverence in which Summers is now held by Harvard students.

Half an hour after his class had ended, the professor still stood on the stage. Beneath him, a line of undergraduates snaked down the aisle, eagerly awaiting their turn to invite him to their dorms for dinner, pepper him with questions about credit default swaps, and just to say hello, thank him for the lecture, and shake his hand….

And here’s a little bit of historical revisionism that, if I were a Harvard professor, I’d be concerned about:

Having alienated a segment of the faculty with his autocratic management style and combative personality during his five years as president, Summers resigned under pressure in 2006….

A segment of the faculty?

(Full disclosure: I’m writing my own piece about Summers, for a different outlet. Watch this space.)

And here’s the kind of thing that just makes you wonder: How smart are Harvard students, really? Or does celebrity trump all their critical thinking?

Listening to him lecture about the economy is like hearing one’s grandfather tell the story of a war he had fought in, with tales from the front lines of the recession woven throughout. A recent lesson on the role of fiscal and monetary policy drew applause.

I’ve no doubt that Summers is a compelling figure in a lecture hall, and I bet those are pretty entertaining and stimulating classes. I’d go to them.

But…like listening to one’s grandfather? Does no one actually care about the substance of Summers’ role? The Shleifer affair? The part he played in creating the economic crisis? His impact on Harvard’s endowment? The millions of dollars he took from banks and a hedge fund just before going to Washington to oversee them? The connection between that and the Obama Administration’s coziness with Wall Street?

I keep reading this article, and this paragraph, by Charles Ferguson, the director of Inside Job, which seems to get much less attention on the Harvard campus than does The Social Network.

Summers is unquestionably brilliant, as all who have dealt with him, including myself, quickly realize. And yet rarely has one individual embodied so much of what is wrong with economics, with academe, and indeed with the American economy. For the past two years, I have immersed myself in those worlds in order to make a film, Inside Job, that takes a sweeping look at the financial crisis. And I found Summers everywhere I turned.

I don’t know what’s worse—whether Harvard students don’t know these things, or whether they do and just don’t care.

I’m not saying, don’t take the man’s classes, or vilify him every day of his life. But are we back to the days of asking for his signature on dollar bills, like little happy panting puppy dogs?

As Summers rushed from class to a lunch appointment across Harvard Yard, three students passing him in the stairwell did a double take. One whispered, “That’s Larry Summers.’’ On the sidewalk in front of the Harvard Bookstore, another undergraduate stopped him for a handshake.

Meanwhile, Christie Romer, to whom Drew Faust denied tenure and Larry Summers pushed out of the White House, argues in the New York Times that the government should be doing more to help America’s unemployed.

What’s wrong with this picture?