Nonetheless, I am not able to support the Graduate School Fund until Prof. Summers departs from Harvard.

Sincerely,
Jacinta Conrad (9/9, fin)

I am incredibly grateful for the financial support that Harvard (and federal funding agencies) provided for my PhD from 1999 to 2005, and I wish to pay that support forward to a new generation of scholars, researchers, and teachers. (8/9)

Bluntly, Prof. Summers understands neither the immense responsibility nor the joyful privilege of working as a professor. It is astonishing that he continues to be allowed to teach students. (7/9)

Based on my fifteen-year career as a professor of engineering at an institution with many fewer resources than Harvard, it is not possible to successfully train and mentor students from a wide variety of backgrounds under these assumptions. (6/9)

As late as 2019, Professor Summers questioned the intellectual capabilities of a large fraction of his students (and, further, treated them as a pool of potential conquests rather than colleagues or collaborators). (5/9)

The recently-revealed private communications between Professor Summers and the late Jeffrey Epstein reveal that Professor Summers learned nothing from this or similar meetings. (4/9)

As a member of Harvard’s (then-named) Women in Physics group, I worked with other graduate students to bring then-President Summers to meet with WiP and understand how his comments contributed to an environment that deleteriously affected the ability of women to conduct physics research. (3/9)

To the Graduate School Fund:

I defended my PhD in Physics at Harvard in May 2005. Earlier that year, the then-president of Harvard, Larry Summers, opined that one of the reasons that there were fewer women in the sciences is that women were not as intellectually capable as men. (2/9)