America: When Larry Summers resigned as president of Harvard University this week, undergraduates protested on campus, some wearing T-shirts saying "Stay, Larry, stay". A poll in the Harvard Crimson, a campus newspaper, found that 57 per cent of students wanted Summers to stay, and just 19 per cent wanted him to leave.
A former treasury secretary under Bill Clinton who became a tenured economics professor at Harvard at 28, Summers is universally acknowledged as intellectually brilliant.
During his five years at Harvard, he sought out contact with undergraduates as few recent presidents had, teaching a freshman's economics course and engaging in open debates with students. He oversaw an expansion of the university's scientific research, including the construction of a new science centre in Boston with a state-of-the-art stem-cell research laboratory.
Summers has been an energetic, ambitious Harvard president, willing to fight any battle in pursuit of his goal of providing a better education for students at the university.
So why did he have to go? Harvard is not only America's oldest and most prestigious university but, with an endowment of $26 billion, it is also the richest. Its academics are among the most illustrious in the world, its student intake the most gifted in America and its facilities peerless.
Yet Harvard students consistently rate their educational experience less positively than students at almost all other Ivy League universities.
When the governing body, Harvard Corporation, appointed Summers in 2001, it wanted someone to shake things up, and the former treasury secretary seemed just the man to do it.
Summers quickly identified as a problem Harvard's decentralised structure, an ancient system known as "every tub on its own bottom" that gives almost unfettered independence to the individual graduate schools. He put the university on a single academic calendar and cut costs by centralising purchasing.
Summers soon won popularity among students with bold initiatives to encourage every undergraduate to spend a year studying abroad and measures to ensure that those from the lowest-income families would pay no fees at Harvard.
The new president's relationship with academic staff was more problematic, however, particularly after he asked some Harvard stars to teach more general courses and to spend more time with students.
Discontent turned to outrage when Summers questioned the value of some tenured professors' research projects, even in disciplines about which he knew little, and complained about them spending too much time on non-university work.
"Once someone's a tenured professor, if he wants to write articles for the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times instead of doing his scholarship, he has every right to do that. Once someone is a tenured professor, they answer to God. It's as simple as that," one professor explained to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Within months of arriving, Summers clashed with Cornel West, the university's most famous African-American scholar, over West missing lectures to take part in a hip-hop recording. Angered by Summers' patronising approach, West decamped to Princeton. Some at Harvard began to question their president's commitment to diversity.
Last year Summers caused an uproar when he suggested that innate differences could explain the lack of women in science and engineering at top universities and research centres. He later apologised, but the faculty of arts and sciences passed a motion of no confidence as doubts grew about his leadership.
There were complaints about the president's pay - his basic annual salary was more than $500,000 - and his ostentatious style, which saw him travelling around campus in a black, chauffeur-driven limousine.
Liberals were upset when Summers accused academics who called for Harvard to withdraw from business relationships with Israel of anti-Semitism. Others objected to his decision to allow the army to re-establish a training corps for officers on campus.
But Summers' greatest difficulty may have been his abrasive personality, evident last month at the Harvard party during the World Economic Forum's meeting in Davos, where he greeted his guests with a gruff hello and a scowl.
"Look, Larry's smiling. Well, he's trying to," one of his colleagues remarked.
Summers came to Harvard with the zeal of a new CEO determined to streamline an underperforming company. But universities are not like most companies, not least because academic tenure means that a new boss cannot clean house by "cutting away the dead wood".
Institutions like Harvard can be cajoled or coaxed into change, but academics have less reason than most employees to give in to bullying or to cede their independence.
By the time Summers created his latest crisis, the resignation of the dean of arts and sciences, the Harvard Corporation had concluded that their president had made too many enemies to be an effective agent of change at the university.
That, in the end, is why Larry Summers had to go.
