Harvard President Emeritus Lawrence H. Summers Named ACTA’s 2025 Philip Merrill Award Winner

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) is pleased to announce that Lawrence H. Summers, the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and president emeritus at Harvard University, is the winner of the 2025 Philip Merrill Award for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education. ACTA bestows this honor annually on extraordinary individuals who have advanced liberal arts education, core curricula, and the teaching of Western Civilization and American history.

Throughout his distinguished career, Dr. Summers has demonstrated uncompromising integrity of purpose and vision. He has championed rigorous undergraduate requirements, firmly defended free speech, and sounded the alarm about rising campus antisemitism decades before the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack in Israel.

He personifies the qualities that the late Philip Merrill envisioned when ACTA established the award in his honor. “Larry Summers has consistently been a strong, courageous, principled, and influential champion of academic freedom and free speech both at Harvard and in the larger public sphere,” said ACTA President Michael Poliakoff. “His frequent, prominent public writings and media interviews provide constructive criticism of universities’ failures to live up to their special truth-seeking mission, while observing the dangers of coercive government intrusion. He has been a powerful voice repudiating campus antisemitism while duly honoring freedom even ‘for the thought that we hate.’”

In 1983, Dr. Summers became one of the youngest tenured professors in Harvard’s history. In 1999, he was confirmed as the 71^st secretary of the treasury under President Bill Clinton. From 2001 to 2006, he served as the 27^th president of Harvard. His administration eliminated all financial obligations from students with family incomes below $60,000 a year, launched major programs for stem cell research and genomics, and led dramatic efforts to renew Harvard College. In 2009, he returned to government service as the director of the White House National Economic Council under President Barack Obama, and in that role, he helped craft a national response to the Great Recession.

Dr. Summers will accept the award and deliver remarks at ACTA’s Merrill Award Gala on October 24, 2025, in Washington, DC. Tributes will be presented by Tom Rollins, founder of The Teaching Company; Nadine Strossen, John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law Emerita at New York Law School; and Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.

For more information about the event and to register, click here.

To see a full list of ACTA’s former Merrill Award winners, click here.