IT WOULD BE A GRAND UNDERSTATEMENT to call Lawrence H. Summers's stewardship of Harvard tumultuous. In his five year tenure, Summers careened from one controversy to another. Oft-times Summers cut a sympathetic figure as he upended the sacred cows of political correctness that have become fixtures of the modern university. Other times, Summers's troubles resulted from personal skills that even his defenders concede didn't evidence much social dexterity.

The Summers reign came to a shockingly abrupt denouement yesterday when he submitted his resignation, effective at the end of the current academic year. When he leaves the president's office, Summers will resume the humble life of a tenured Harvard economics professor who has one of the most accomplished records of anyone in his field.

As for what is in store for Harvard, that remains to be seen.

SUMMERS'S TROUBLES began shortly after he assumed his office. Acting far more like a modern CEO than a modern university president, Summers tried to run Harvard as a hands-on manager. This is the opposite tack taken by most university presidents, who are content to be their school's fundraiser-in-chief and public figurehead.

Instead, Summers declared that the Harvard faculty should be more involved with undergrads. He challenged the scholarship of some of his tenured faculty members, making a particular cause of celebrity professor Cornel West's sometimes untraditional pursuits. These attempts to supervise the faculty were often met with reactions ranging from disdain to hostility.

And then there were Summers's political stands. Summers belittled a campaign that urged divestment in Israel.

SO SUMMERS already had a sizeable group of enemies by the time he stood before an academic conference and mused that a contributing factor to the under-representation of women in the hard sciences might perhaps be due to different intrinsic abilities between the sexes. The furor that followed wasn't really caused by these comments. As even his fiercest critics conceded at the time, it was merely "the straw that broke the camel's back."

The net result of that controversy was the faculty narrowly passing a no-confidence referendum on Summers's leadership. That was almost a year ago.

Summers waged a contrition campaign which lasted for almost a year. He repeatedly apologized for his comments and avoided any of the blunt utterances that had previously characterized his tenure. His name faded from the newspapers and when it did appear it was because Summers was doing something typical of university presidents, such as announcing a fund-raising coup--as he did when Saudi Prince Alwaleed bestowed $20 million on the university for its Department of Middle Eastern Studies. (Alwaleed had previously earned a measure of infamy shortly after 9/11 when New York mayor Rudy Giuliani rejected his $10 million gift to help rebuild New York because of offensive comments he had made regarding America's foreign policy and Israel.)

This campaign to save his job, however, was doomed from the start. Summers's detractors on the faculty were quite clear all along that there was no way their relationship with their president could be mended.