"Larry Summers has weathered the storm. He will be president of Harvard for a very long time," a celebrity professor who runs a major center there told me in 2005, as the Harvard Corporation upheld Summers against faculty outraged by his ham-handedness.

Even after new revelations forced Summers' resignation, his defenders insisted he'd been martyred on the altar of political correctness by professorial mandarins who'd hyped up his gross manners, his dressing-down of the African-American scholar Cornel West, and his suggestion that some kind of bell curve favors men over women in the sciences.

But Summers endangered more than political correctness (some of which deserved what he gave it). Dean Baker has explained here better than I ever can how republics falter under Summers' kind of hyper-neo-liberalism. But let me say a bit more about what Barack Obama should know of Summers' civic liabilities before he considers making him Treasury Secretary, a post he held briefly under Bill Clinton.

"Larry was chosen to change the paradigm of university presidents," my faculty source reminded me, "and were he more charming, the transformation in the nature of leadership in the university would have been effected fairly seamlessly."

But that's what's scary about Summers - not his affronts to campus progressive goodthink but his accelerated bottom-lining of everything, from liberal education to the American republic.

Naturally, economics and business at Harvard flourished under Summers. But destructively. No one could get him to remove the name of former Sotheby auction emporium chief Alfred Taubman from Taubman Hall after his federal conviction, imprisonment and cynical self-celebration in Christopher Mason's The Art of the Steal.

More amusingly, there was Summers' trifling response to the 2005 arrest of economics professor Martin Weitzman, caught neglecting the free-market practice of paying for goods by swiping several truckloads of horse manure from a neighbor's farm.

Far more worrisome was Summers' support and protection of his long-time friend and fellow-Harvard economist Andrei Shleifer during and after Shleifer "was caught red-handed lining his pockets with various investments in Russia while leading a Harvard team advising the government of Russia on behalf of the government of the United States," as David Warsh characterized the mess in Economicprincipals.com. The publication Institutional Investor made devoted 25,000 words to a devastating expose by the veteran investigative reporter David McClintick.
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It was priorities such as Harvard's in the Schleifer scandal, not politically correct petulance, that turned even faculty moderates against Summers. Naturally, a Wall Street Journal editorial likened Harvard's "left-wing" faculty to a people's congress in Pyongyang, but it was the Harvard Corporation - as high-a capitalist body as the U.S. Treasury, which one of its members, Robert Rubin had also run -- that showed Summers the door for, among other indiscretions, encouraging Harvard's arrogant defense (including the payment of legal fees) of Shleifer's extralegal investment antics under its aegis.

Summers' interim replacement at Harvard, its former president Derek Bok, was everything a champion of liberal education should be. But can Harvard and other crucibles of American national leadership keep nourishing civic republicans like Obama, who we can hope are virtuous as well as canny enough (and progressive enough) to save capitalism from itself by reconfiguring not only how we regulate corporations but even how we charter and empower them?

Or will our colleges be morphed into career centers and cultural gallerias for a global ruling class, trained by brilliant civic primitives like Summers and Shleifer to be unaccountable to any polity or moral code? Will we keep on reading about students weaned on rational-choice gamesmanship and self-marketing, jumping to quarterly bottom lining in a kind of Nintendo game of one-upmanship, opportunistic back-scratching, and resumé padding?

What new paradigm of national leadership training might set students' sights higher than that, warding off the easy answers of neoconservative and neoliberal grand strategists alike, to say nothing of dizzy post-modernists? Harvard may or may not find answers, but it was racing to nowhere under Summers.

Since the Wall Street Journal and the neo-Conintern defended him so loudly when Harvard rejected him, it would be amusing to watch them defend their darling again as top lieutenant of a president they dread. But the pleasure of watching Obama's critics writhe isn't quite enough to make me want to see him entrust Lawrence Summers with the allocation of an enormous stimulus package.