Spring 2007 Snyder Lecture

Former Harvard President Lawrence Summers to speak at Tufts University about "Rethinking Undergraduate Education"

Medford/Somerville, Mass. [03.12.07] Tufts University will present Lawrence H. Summers, former president of Harvard University, as the next speaker in the Richard E. Snyder President's Lecture Series on March 14 at 7:30 p.m. in Cohen Auditorium, Aidekman Arts Center, on Tufts' Medford/Somerville campus.

Watch video of lecture (1h 27m; requires Real Player)

Summers will give the sixth Snyder lecture on "Rethinking Undergraduate Education." Endowed by Richard E. Snyder, who graduated from Tufts in 1955 and is the former chairman and CEO of Simon and Schuster, this lecture series was established in 2004 to bring to Tufts speakers who have challenged conventional wisdom in their professional work.

"As president of Harvard, Dr. Summers strived to make the university more student centered, to encourage faculty to spend time teaching undergraduates, to provide more opportunities for Harvard students to study abroad, and to rationalize the Harvard core curriculum," said Tufts President Lawrence S. Bacow. "These are all important areas to address in undergraduate education today."

Summers graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975 and continued his education in economics at Harvard, where he received a doctoral degree in 1982. He then went to Washington as a domestic policy economist for the President's Council of Economic Advisers.

Summers is the former Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy at Harvard and in the past decade served in a series of senior public policy positions, most recently as secretary of the treasury of the United States. Summers took office as the 27th president of Harvard University on July 1, 2001, and served until June 30, 2006. He is now the Charles W. Eliot University Professor.

The next lecture in the series will take place this fall with Lynn Margulis, a distinguished university professor in the department of geoscience at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.