“Maybe the most striking feature of being a professor is how much control one has over one’s schedule,” he says. “When one goes to government, others set the schedule and the pace.”

Also predetermined in government is one’s area of focus. “When you’re in academia, you focus on a small number of things of your choosing that not a lot of people care about, at your pace,” says Harvard Law School professor Daniel J. Meltzer, ‘72, who was Principal Deputy Counsel to the President from 2009-2010. “None of that is true for working at the White House.”

Both Summers and Tribe note the challenge of not being able to speak freely in public or to the press without clearing remarks with the administration.

“Every time I made a speech, it had to get vetted,” Tribe says.

Although there are dramatic differences in the two atmospheres, Liebman acknowledges that both Harvard and Washington share some similarities.

“In both places, you get to work on very challenging issues with very smart people,” he says.

Tribe says that working as a professor and working in government offer different avenues to affect change. Working as a professor is “very rewarding over a very long term,” because professors make a difference by writing and teaching. As a public servant, however, Tribe says it was apparent in the short-term that he was “helping people with desperate problems.”

While in Washington, Tribe helped implement the Access to Justice Initiative, which seeks to help people with low or middle incomes find legal aid.

Summers, who in his time at the White House helped devise the $787 billion stimulus package, says he felt the impact of his work was more immediate when working in government.

“When you work in the White House on a project, it can come to fruition in a matter of hours,” Summers says.

In academia, he says, projects can take “far, far longer” to implement.

SHIPPING BACK TO BOSTON

There’s a great Harvardism about professors’ attempts to get an extension on leaves of absence: If they wouldn’t do it for Henry Kissinger, they probably won’t do it for you.

When Summers left the White House, his profile departure was surrounded about questions why he had chosen to leave. Some of it probably chalked up to wanting to keep his tenure given that the University revokes the status after an absence longer than two years.

Still, each professor had his own reasons for leaving Washington to return to Cambridge.