Lawrence Summers Will Advise a Free-Speech Advocacy Group

Lawrence H. Summers, the former president of Harvard University, has joined the Board of Advisors to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the free-speech advocacy group announced today. Mr. Summers certainly knows a thing or two about controversial speech: He stepped down from Harvard’s presidency in 2006, shortly after making much-criticized comments about women’s intrinsic abilities in the sciences.

For nearly two years Mr. Summers served in the Obama administration as director of the National Economic Council; in 2010 he returned to Harvard as a professor.

The foundation, known as FIRE, is an advocacy group that seeks to protect individual rights, including freedom of speech, on college campuses. It has supported a number of lawsuits against campus speech codes that it deems unconstitutional.