CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (AP) -- Lawrence Summers steps down Friday after five tumultuous years as president of Harvard University. The Associated Press asked him about his tenure there, and his responses are excerpted below.
AP: What do you expect will be the legacy of your presidency?
Summers: I think it's been a very good five years for the university. We've expanded our commitment to equal opportunity by becoming the first university in the country to eliminate tuition for families earning under $60,000, laid a foundation for that threshold to increase in the future. We've substantially increased the university's commitment to public service.
The university has launched the greatest period of scientific expansion in its history. Twenty football fields worth of laboratory space are now either under construction or in the planning stage, including space for the stem cell institute, which is filling a gap left when the federal government abdicated in this area.
I hope when history looks back not at me but at this period in Harvard's history, they'll see it as a period when the university moved ambitiously and adventurously forward in many different directions. They'll see it as a period when the university didn't shrink from things that were controversial.
AP: If you could do it again, what would you have done differently?
Summers: There are always things one looks back at, but as I said in my commencement speech, I was a man in a hurry these last five years, because I thought the university could make enormous contributions not just to its students but to the world. So I did push very hard, maybe at some points too hard for an institution that is 370 years old. But my feeling is one of satisfaction with the magnitude of the changes that have taken place.
AP: You have apologized for your controversial remarks that innate ability may partly explain why fewer women reach top-level science jobs, but you also said any idea should be on the table as a university. How do you reconcile that?
Summers: As president I bear responsibility for the signal that my remarks send, and the signal that was sent by those remarks was anything but what I intended or what I believe. And so I have taken responsibility for that. At the same time, no subject should be off limits for academic research in a university, and at a time when 30 percent more women are graduating from college than men, I think we ignore the whole topic of gender differences in learning styles very much at our peril.
In the meantime while that research is being done I think the right agenda is pretty clear: it's to turn heat into light. ... We've done that with a variety of changes in our parental leave policies, or changes in the ways in which we provide research support and mentoring, and I think that's something quite constructive that has come out of the furor.
AP: You've said Harvard is the world's greatest research university, but is not yet recognized for providing the world's best undergraduate education. Why not?
Summers: I think the single most important issue is faculty-student engagement, where there is too large a fraction of our teaching that takes place in sections taught by graduate students. Too much of it takes place in large lectures, where faculty members don't know students' names. And too little of it involves the kind of active learning experience, whether it's in a laboratory, a debate in a class, or whether it's a seminar dialogue, or whether it's joint work in an archives.
AP: Harvard is governed essentially the way it was 350 years ago: by a secretive, 7-member, self-perpetuating body called the Harvard Corporation. Does the system need to change?
Summers: I think the university does need to reflect on questions of governance... The university's governance structure was set at a very different time when universities were investing much less than they're able to invest today, when the demands on them from a larger society are much less than they are today.
And so I think particularly after a period of some tension between a president and members of the faculty, I think it would be appropriate for there to be reflection on institutions of governance at Harvard.
AP: But to what end?
Summers: I think the university needs to be more prepared to change and adapt itself. I think that the veto power is too widely distributed within the university. There's too much stove-piping into individual disciplines and individual departments. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences hasn't created or eliminated a department in more than 35 years.
AP: Surely a former Treasury secretary could find good work on Wall Street. Do you really plan to return to Harvard as a professor after you finish your sabbatical?
Summers: I'm very committed now to really reflecting and thinking and writing on a whole range of economic and public policy questions, and there's no set of resources for someone with those interests that's comparable to the set of resources at Harvard. And so I'm very much looking forward to re-engaging with debate over economic policy, American foreign policy, questions of fairness and inclusion within our domestic economy. And I don't think there's a better place to do that than at Harvard.