A Summers day — this Boston Phoenix writer is less than impressed by the pageantry of the installation of a new Harvard University president, which is “supposed to be as close to a coronation as America gets”; and no more impressed by the man himself:

…(I)n 1983 he

became one of the youngest tenured

professors in the school’s history

when he took the post of Nathaniel

Ropes Professor of Political Economy.

In 1991, he left Harvard and went to

Washington, taking on a leading role at the World Bank. In 1993, he joined the

Treasury Department, and six years later he was named secretary of the

Treasury. While at the Treasury, Summers became one of President Clinton’s

most trusted advisers — not to mention a frequent tennis partner of Alan

Greenspan.

Summers is the local boy made good — the local boy made bloody great, in fact.

Anything less than this would’ve been a disappointment. Summers was born into

a family of financial wizards. His mother and father were economics professors,

and two of his uncles — MIT’s Paul Samuelson and Stanford University’s

Kenneth Arrow — are Nobel laureates in economics. Summers is the

consummate overachiever, an inveterate smarty-pants. And he’ll have to be to

take on this job.