Doug Foy, the former head of the Conservation Law Foundation who Mitt Romney hired to be his head of development, is resigning. Romney surprised a lot of people when he hired Foy – many thought that a pro-business Republican like Romney wouldn’t see eye to eye on very many issues with a pragmatic but committed environmentalist like Foy. The AP story reports rumors that those kinds of disagreements had become a problem – “there were reports within the environmental community that Foy was chafing at some administration initiatives.” Foy also committed a no-no with respect to the Boston Harbor LNG project by involving himself in an issue affecting a company in which he held stock. No further word (yet) on why Foy chose this moment to depart.
And across the Charles River, the beleaguered President of Harvard University, Larry Summers, has announced that he will resign at the end of the academic year (be patient with this link – it took me several tries to load it, no doubt due to heavy traffic). Summers ruffled a lot of feathers at Harvard in his brief tenure as President (the shortest since Cornelius Felton died in office in 1862, says the AP), and apparently the Corporation (the seven-member board that runs the show) could no longer stand the heat coming from the faculty. The Corporation’s letter accepting Summers’ resignation is here. The letter notes at the end that Summers will take a sabbatical in 2006-07, and that he will be rewarded with an appointment as University Professor when he returns from his sabbatical. Derek Bok, who was Harvard’s President from 1971-1991, will return to serve as interim President – perhaps this explains Bok’s resignation as head of Common Cause last week. The timing seems a bit too close to be pure coincidence – Bok must have known Summers’ resignation was coming.
The AP says. No wonder he had such trouble.