Before being named interim president at Harvard University this week, provost Dr. Alan M. Garber already had one of the most wide-ranging and powerful roles at the university — he was in the room for many of the institution’s most pivotal moments.
For this, Garber was paid about $946,000 in salary from the university for the 2021-2022 academic year alone, recent Harvard tax filings show. But in roughly the same period, the physician and health economist earned more money as a board member for two major drug companies, Vertex Pharmaceuticals and California-based Exelixis Inc. Those two part-time roles netted Garber at least $963,000 in the 2022 fiscal year, records show.
Garber remains listed on both companies’ websites as a member of their boards. Harvard spokesman Jonathan Swain declined to provide details on Garber’s board membership status, and spokespeople for Exelixis and Vertex Pharmaceuticals did not respond to requests for comment.
Following Claudine Gay’s abrupt resignation and amid nationwide squalls of controversy regarding the work of Ivy League presidents, Garber’s sudden ascension to Harvard’s top post has put a spotlight on his corporate earnings and side jobs.
The practice of university leaders serving on the boards of private and public for-profit companies — and earning significant compensation for it — is increasingly widespread. But experts on university governance and critics say it can raise a host of conflicts of interest, especially in health care industries where academia and industry are often deeply enmeshed.
“To put someone in as president, even in the interim, who has some major conflicts of interest that take him away from his all-encompassing role — they need his full attention focused on the job at hand,” said Carolyn Becker, a retired associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who with other medical professionals has pushed a petition to ban hospital presidents from serving on boards.
Becker noted that board members at for-profit companies often have a fiduciary responsibility to those entities and their shareholders, which could collide with their duties at their primary institutions.
“It’s such an obvious conflict, especially for people in the medical field,” Becker added.
Swain declined to say if Garber plans to continue serving on the two boards in his new role, or if Garber would release more information about his financial interest in those companies. Garber, through Swain, also declined to be interviewed. The university has not outlined its plan for a presidential search or said whether Garber would be considered for a permanent role.
Garber’s outside, corporate compensation is on the higher end of what other university administrative peers earn, according to a Globe review of current Ivy League presidents and provosts and publicly filed financial documents.
The most comparable example is Martha Pollack, the president at Cornell, who joined the board of directors at IBM in late 2018 and has earned at least $1.4 million to date, filings show.
Because Harvard is a private institution, many of its financial arrangements and relationships are cloaked in secrecy. But a person’s board membership or affiliation, as well as their payouts, are often detailed by public-facing companies or nonprofits in tax filings, as is in Garber’s case.
Harvard does require faculty and those with teaching appointments to file annually conflict of financial interest forms that detail their or their family members’ significant financial interests “in any related outside entity.”
Garber, 68, is a noted scholar in health economics, and received a PhD from Harvard before moving to Stanford University — where he had simultaneously earned a medical degree — to teach for 25 years.
He left Stanford in 2011 to become provost at Harvard. As provost, Garber’s main task was managing the university’s internal educational functions such as student affairs and faculty relations, and acting as the university’s chief administrator on academic matters. The role also includes other administrative responsibilities depending on the president’s needs.
As interim president, Garber will be the public face of the institution — and decision-maker — for all matters.
His ties to those pharmaceutical companies are longstanding. He joined the board of Exelixis, which makes anticancer medications, in 2005 while he was still teaching medicine at Stanford University. He began serving on Boston biotech company Vertex Pharmaceuticals’ board in 2017 after he had moved to Cambridge.
Since starting at Harvard, those roles have netted him more than $6.6 million, with most of that value conveyed through stocks and options, according to SEC filings. His board roles have also allowed him to expense food or lodging costs associated with his board responsibilities, according to data from the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Top-tier university presidents are increasingly augmenting their administrative salaries with compensation for corporate board service, said Michael Harris, a professor of higher education at Southern Methodist University who has studied university governance.
“Presidents will tell you the benefits of this are making more connections for the institutions, or bringing in grants,” he said. “The critics would say it’s much more about lining their personal pocketbooks.”
Recent studies indicate about a third of such top-tier university presidents sit on boards for publicly traded companies, with an average compensation around $148,000 per year for each corporate board seat, said James Finkelstein, a George Mason University professor who has studied the issue since 1998.
Not all private companies are required to share salary information, making it difficult to ascertain how much is paid out. Dartmouth president Sian Beilock currently sits on the board of directors for Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, and the nature and breadth of compensation is not publicly available.
A Dartmouth spokeswoman declined to answer questions about Beilock’s board salary, and a Bridgewater spokesman declined to comment on the record.
A president’s holding a board membership is not new to Harvard. Former president Drew Faust in 2012 joined the board of directors for Staples, the office supplies giant, partway through her tenure. The decision drew public criticism from some corners, including the postal workers’ union.
Lawrence S. Bacow, Gay’s predecessor, was also on the boards of Loews Corporation and health care supplies distributor Henry Schein Inc., but resigned from all his corporate board seats before becoming Harvard president in July 2018.
Finkelstein, the George Mason professor, said school administrators will often say such board roles help them build relationships or get better insight into leadership or corporate jobs. But Finkelstein said research has failed to turn up data proving such board service yields tangible benefits for the university involved.
“If these companies become donors to the universities, we don’t see any evidence of that. If they enter into major research agreements with the universities, we don’t see any evidence of that,” he said. “If they employ more graduates of these institutions, we don’t see any evidence of that.”
Boards, however, earn some legitimacy and prestige from having university presidents in such oversight or advisory capacity, he added.
“At the end of the day, we know what the personal benefits are for these presidents,” said Finkelstein. “We can literally take it to the bank.”
The prevalence of school presidents on corporate boards coincides with a trend of rising salaries for university administrators, experts say. And at some top-ranked universities, leaders also get additional perks, like housing on campus. Garber, for example, lives in a 6,400-square-foot, three-story home paid for by the university. This arrangement has an estimated annual value of roughly $148,000, according to the school’s most recent nonprofit tax forms filed in 2023.
Harvard has several other connections to the drug company Vertex. The company’s founder, Joshua Boger, received his doctorate in chemistry from the school and currently serves on Harvard Medical School’s board of fellows. In 2022, Douglas Melton, the co-director of Harvard Stem Cell Institute, left Harvard to develop diabetes treatments for the drug maker.
Elizabeth Koh can be reached at elizabeth.koh@globe.com or on Signal at koh.20. Follow her @elizabethrkoh.