Transcription
Well, former Harvard University President Larry Summers continues to step back from the public after emails between himself and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were released. Today, Summers announced he will resign from his his position on the board of Open AI.
Now, at the same time, Harvard is opening a new inquiry into faculty connections with Jeffrey Epstein. That will include another investigation into Summers. A student in one of the summer in one of summer's classes posted this video of him talking about Epstein.
"Some of you will have seen my statement of regret expressing my shame uh with respect to what I did in communication with Mr. Epstein and that I've said that I'm going to step back from public activities but for a time but I think it's very important to fulfill my teaching obligation."
Harvard student newspaper, The Crimson, has been covering this story extensively. So, let's bring in Cam Shastava, the college administration reporter for the Crimson and a junior at Harvard College. Cam, let's start kind of talking about what Larry Summers role is as a professor at Harvard. He teaches multiple classes, right?
"That's right. So, Professor Summers teaches several courses. Um he's currently teaching two undergraduate courses and um graduate courses as well. He's held the title of university professor since 2011. So he's still very much ingrained in the fabric of Harvard."
So what are students saying about Larry Summers? Are they protesting outside of his class or maybe inside the class? What do they want to see from Harvard?
"So, as you saw in the video, Professor Summers did give a short remark at the beginning of class announcing um the new revelations regarding his ties with Epstein. Um the class did proceed uninterrupted. Um but across several interviews that we've held over the last few days, students are not pleased with the new revelations. More than a dozen students we interviewed called on Summers to resign from his post as university professor. Um they said that he's simply not um apt to be teaching right now in light of the revelations that he communicated with Epstein up until the day before Epstein was arrested in July of 2019."
Now you also covered the school's new inquiry into faculty ties to Epstein from the perspective of students. Do you think that that's enough?
"Well, so what we've heard so far is that Harvard is going to conduct a new probe into Summers' ties with Epstein. Harvard now has a lot more information to work with in light of the documents that were released by Congress last Wednesday. And it's important to note that this probe will not only look at Summers' ties to Epstein, but it will also look at any Harvard affiliates or professors that were implicated across the documents, and nearly a dozen were. So, the exact timeline of this probe or how they will go about it is unclear, but what we do know is that they will be relying on these documents and potentially um further ones that might be released by uh the Justice Department down the line."
All right, Cam, thank you so much.
"Thank you for having."