Unflattering news coverage dogged Lawrence H. Summers in the year leading up to his resignation last February as president of Harvard University. Now Mr. Summers will be penning his own articles as both a columnist for the Financial Times and an occasional contributor to Open University, a blog produced by The New Republic.

The Guardian, a British newspaper, reported that Mr. Summers, an economist and former U.S. treasury secretary, would begin writing this month for the Financial Times, a British business newspaper. The editor of the Financial Times, Lionel Barber, promised that Mr. Summers’s columns on economic issues, education, and politics would be “highly provocative.”

“Mr. Summers will bring a unique combination of intellectual rigour and insight to the newspaper and Web site,” Mr. Barber told The Guardian. Based on his track record at Harvard, provocative would seem to come easy to Mr. Summers. His comments in January 2005 about women’s abilities in science and mathematics started the avalanche of criticism that led, just 13 months later, to his resignation.

As a blogger for The New Republic, Mr. Summers will be one of 24 scholarly contributors who will ruminate on “controversies in campus politics that warrant thoughtful discussion,” according to Open University’s Web site. The Boston Business Journal reported on both of Mr. Summers’s new moonlighting gigs.

The former president, who is in the midst of a one-year sabbatical, is slated to return to Harvard as a high-ranking professor.