The Harvard Crimson has run a lengthy two-part report on
It turns out that Summers repeatedly told insiders and advisers that the crisis was “bullshit.” His staff and various advisers (but not former Clinton officials David Gergen and Robert Rubin) repeatedly told him to apologize, adopting a strategy the Crimson says, in a casual understatement, “may have been overly optimistic:”
A day after his now-infamous remarks on women in science were made public, University President Lawrence H. Summers gathered his senior staff inside his Massachusetts Hall office to plot a response. Most of the staff members told their boss that he would have to begin apologizing to the Harvard community. But Summers disagreed.
“This is bullshit,” he said, according to two people who received detailed accounts of the meeting later that day. . . .
Summers’ advisers argued that a forthright apology might snuff out the controversy before it intensified, according to the two sources. That assessment, in hindsight, may have been overly optimistic. . . .
With his presidency in crisis, it was Summers himself — backed by a few confidantes outside Mass. Hall — who resisted kowtowing to the Faculty in the days before the controversy turned into a national uproar. . . .
[A]ccording to several people familiar with the discussions in Mass. Hall, Summers was reluctant to bend on two key points: academic freedom, which he felt should have protected his right to hypothesize on unsettled scientific issues, and the faculty’s criticisms of his leadership, which he thought were unfair and ill-willed. . . .
All of [Summers’ key staffers], to varying degrees, urged Summers to capitulate . . . .
“The key words [of Summers’ key staffers] in Mass. Hall back then were: give it up,” said one person who was briefed on the discussions. “People weren’t disputing that Larry was being treated unfairly. He certainly was. But they were trying to tell him that that was irrelevant. He still had to apologize, and he still had to be sorry.”
By Thursday of that first week, Summers had made his first unqualified apology, in a meeting with the Harvard Standing Committee on Women. It would not be his last one, nor even close to his last one — as Mr. Liu might have predicted.