CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Besieged Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers announced Tuesday that he would resign at the end of the academic year, avoiding open warfare with a growing bloc of alienated faculty members and ending a five-year tenure mired in controversy.
Summers, a former Treasury secretary renowned for his intellect and his impatience, had appeared to weather fractious relations with the esteemed university's faculty of arts and sciences last year after he made public amends for his acerbic management style and for remarks that had angered many of Harvard's female faculty members.
But Summers fell victim to recurring clashes with professors and new concerns about his handling of the resignation of a popular dean and a legal scandal involving an old friend in the university's economics department.
During a telephone news conference Tuesday, Summers said he had made the decision on his own last week after concluding "very reluctantly that the agenda for the university I cared about, as well as my own satisfaction, would be best served by stepping down."
Summers' stint as Harvard's president was one of the shortest in the university's history. Derek Bok, Harvard's president from 1971 to 1991, is to take over July 1 as interim president until a replacement is chosen by Harvard Corp., the university's governing board. Summers said he would take a sabbatical and return to Harvard as one of the school's elite "University Professors."
Summers said he was leaving with a sense of satisfaction for overhauling Harvard's undergraduate courses, improving science facilities and launching a major expansion in the Boston neighborhood of Allston.
But he wearily admitted to "mixed emotion," expressing regret for "rifts and cleavages" that continually damaged his relations with faculty members. At the same time, Summers complained that faculty parochialism had thwarted his initiatives.
"Certainly there were moments when I could have challenged the community more wisely and more respectfully," Summers said. "Those too are lessons to be learned."
Summers said his hand had not been forced by the board, whose seven members guide university planning and hiring decisions. "Obviously, in talking to a number of people, I spoke with members of the corporation, but it was my decision," he said.
