U.S.

His Heart's At Harvard

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

March 11, 2001 / 6:44 PM EST / CBS

Some had said it would have been a good position for Al Gore, who's now teaching at Columbia University, but another Clinton administration alumni has landed the job.

Lawrence H. Summers, once a star academic who was Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, will return to Harvard University as its 27th president.

Summers' appointment was approved by the university's Board of Overseers Sunday. He will replace Neil H. Rudenstine, who is stepping down in June after a decade at the helm of the nation's oldest university.

Summers, 46, lacks the university administrative experience of the two other finalists - University of Michigan President Lee C. Bollinger and Harvard provost Harvey V. Fineberg. But he has close Harvard ties, having earned his doctorate there in 1982 and a year later having become the youngest faculty member ever granted tenure.

His heart apparently never strayed all that far from Cambridge.

"All the time Larry was in Washington, he always wanted to talk about Harvard," said Richard Zeckhauser, a professor at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government who knew Summers' parents and met Summers when he was a precious 12-year-old.

"I'd say, 'You're really into interesting things, you're bailing out Thailand.' And he'd say, 'How are things going at the law school?' " explains Zeckhauser.

Summers is currently a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank.

A native of New Haven, Conn., Summers, 46, graduated from MIT at age 20 and did his graduate work at Harvard.

He taught at MIT from 1979 to 1982, and then served for 10 months as a domestic policy economist on President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers until 1983, an experience he said left him disillusioned.

After leaving Washington, he was named a professor of economics at Harvard. In 1987, he became Harvard's Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy, until he left the university in 1993.

During his time at Harvard, he became a part of Gov. Michael Dukakis' "kitchen cabinet" during Dukakis' failed 1988 presidential campaign, emerging as a point man in Dukakis' coterie of outside advisers.

Summers also served as the World Bank's chief economist from 1991 to 1993, then undersecretary of the U.S Treasury for international affairs from 1993 to 1995, then deputy Treasury secretary in 1995.

Former President Clinton appointed him Secretary of the Treasury in July 1999.

President George W. Bush appointed Paul H. O'Neill to replace Summers as Secretary of the Treasury in January.