Critics of his politically incorrect comments and blunt management style are to circulate a letter for signature by faculty members declaring no confidence in his leadership.

Such a motion, unprecedented in Harvard’s history, may be tabled at what promises to be a stormy faculty meeting on Tuesday but the vote is more likely to take place next month.

The debate has entered dangerous territory for Summers, 50, a former Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton. American academics are renowned for political correctness and a growing posse of professors is determined to unseat him.

Alan Dershowitz, a law professor and defender of Summers, said: “In my 41 years at Harvard I have never experienced a president more open to debate, disagreement and dialogue.”

If Summers’s opponents are to be believed, he made not only unforgivably sexist remarks in his lecture about whether women were as suited as men to science, but also made potentially racist and anti-semitic remarks as well.

According to Summers, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, white men were “substantially underestimated in the National Basketball Association”. He added that there were not many Jewish farmers or Catholic investment bankers, before making the serious point that many women with families were not willing to put in the 80-hour weeks that “high-powered” jobs demand.

Summers has repeatedly apologised for his remarks, saying, “If I could turn back the clock, I would have spoken differently.”

Whether his generalisations, which he hedged with doubt, have a dash of truth is a secondary issue for some critics. “It is as if he has a dozen flat feet,” said Everett Mendelsohn, a professor of the history of science. “What seems to him like an intelligent provocation can be very insulting.”

Mendelsohn added that Summers’s management tactics, regarded as “controlling and bullying”, had also alienated staff.

Summers has been accused of tactlessness before. As chief economist at the World Bank in the early 1990s he put his name to a memorandum arguing the economic case for dumping the first world’s rubbish in developing countries.

He fell foul of some staff shortly after his arrival at Harvard by criticising the scholarly skills of Cornel West, a professor of African-American studies who appeared in The Matrix film trilogy. West decamped to Princeton, an arch rival, taking some of his colleagues with him.

Steven Pinker, the bestselling psychologist and also a Harvard professor, is one defender of Summers’s lecture. “ I thought it was masterly,” Pinker said. “All his claims were well supported in the scientific literature.”

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