A Gifted Troubleshooter

Harvard's renowned success in fundraising, building a $2 billion endowment, and managing the University's 60 budgets depends on an innovative staff in the office of the financial vice president Last week, one of Harvard's brightest and fastest-rising financial stars, Robert A. Rotner, moved into a key job when he took over from Ann S. Ramsay as head of the University's budget office.

Rotner will actually have broader responsibilities than Ramsay, who served as Director of Budgets for six years. His division of the financial office will coordinate the budgeting and longer range fiscal planning among all of the University's faculties museums, libraries, and sundry other facilities.

Since 1977 Rotner has worked as publisher of Harvard Magazine and handled numerous "troubleshooting" finanical chores for Vice President Thomas O'Brien, all the while earning accolades for his intelligence and managerial skills. "He's one of the best administrators at Harvard," says Ramsay, whom Rotner has worked closely with since coming to Harvard, and who is now leaving for a job in private business.

Rotner's quick rise within the University's financial infrastructure is rather surprising because he was originally trained as a publisher and came to Harvard as part of the overhaul of Harvard Magazine in 1977.

His roots in the journalism business took hold in 1972, when he co founded The Real Paper, an "alternative," left wing Boston tabloid that approximated. The Village Voice in style and content. With little experience in building and managing a fledgling newspaper Rotner became. The Real Paper's first publisher.

The period after we started was exciting and run, he remembers, as a group of novices built the paper into a popular part of Boston's liberal culture. "We relied on ourselves a lot" for crucial decisions about marketing strategy, building circulation, and fiscal problem-solving, he says.

For Rotner, his six years as head of The Real Paper became an extended on the-job training period where he learned the business side of publishing inside out. But after the paper was sold to national interests in 1976, he says, the fun and challenge of his job disappeared. He stayed on for another year to assure a smooth transition of ownership--an early demonstration of the loyalty which has won him so much praise in his present job--before accepting Harvard's offer to oversee the expansion and fiscal rebuilding of Harvard Magazine.

Before Rotner took over the magazine, which has editorial autonomy from the administration, it had a paid circulation of about 25,000 and was supposed to survive on its own revenue and a "reasonable" stipend from the University. After a series of disastrous financial years in the mid-1970s made it clear that the magazine would not survive in that format, the Corporation decided to restructure its circulation and bring in new management.

The magazine was expanded fivefold, with free subscriptions given to all all alumni of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and two yearly issues sent to 80,000 graduate school alumni. To pay for this growth, the University increased its financial commitment to the magazine, but it also charged it with raising substantial new revenues through advertising and donations.

Rotner became the new publisher responsible for making the project a success. it would prove to be the first of many administrative coups for him and within a year O'Brien, who had come to Harvard at almost the same time, was assigning him to other projects in his free time.

Today the magazine raises about 70 percent of its costs, Rotner says, and its larger role in promoting alumni affairs has made it "a fine way to communicate for a lot less than it actually costs."

His experience with publishing led to his first trouble-shooting task-evaluating the need for a central University publishing office between 1978 and '79. In his year-long study he suggested ways for the University's numerous decentralized publications to save money by routing their production and design through a central office. As a result he got broader responsibilities and a new title--University Publisher--in 1979.

In the same year he went on a series of overseas "rescue missions" to help re order the finances of Villa I Tatti. Harvard's Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence Italy Like Harvard Magazine, Villa I Tatti had fallen into fiscal disarray with a series of large deficits, and the Corporation had brought in new management to revamp the operation.

"Since management and finance is one of my areas, and I had worked with creative people. [O'Brien thought] I might be able to help. Rotner says, explaining his first financial work outside the publishing sector. Typically, he credits Villa I Tatti's new director. Craig Smyth for the renewed success of the institute but high level officials like O'Brien are quick to single out Rotner for restructuring its budgets and management strategy.

"He really knows how to break issues down without losing sight of how the pieces fit to gather," says O'Brien citing Villa I Tatti as perhaps Rotner's finest success. "The organizations he has looked at are very complex.

Villa I Tatti's new lease on fiscal life red O'Brien to make Rotner the liason to two other Harvard artistic bastions, the Fogg Art Museum and the American Repertory Theater ART I of both organizations he has served as a financial consultant who has been able to enhance communication with the central administration because of his appreciation for the unique fiscal needs of artists and other creative workers.

As the unofficial advocate for the ART during its year long review by the University. Rotner "improved the level of sophistication and information about the way we operate," says Robert J. Orchard, managing director of the ART. At the same time, he has performed similar duties during a difficult period at the Fogg, helping plan construction of its new building and serving as interim associate director during the search for a new director.

Rotner likes to credit his record of repeated success and rapid advancement to a very close and comfortable relationship with colleagues like O'Brien and Ramsay. "It's key to understand the relationship between Ann. Tom, and me," he explains. "I'm very happy; I love my job. It's a chance to work with incredibly interesting people."

With the departure of Ramsay and the promotion of former Director of Financial Systems Robert H. Scott to a vice presidency. Rotner has emerged as perhaps the key figure in the day-to-day financial operation of the University. His impressive string of managerial triumphs would seem to bode well for the future of Harvard's financial machine.

"He really knows how to break issues down without losing sight of how the pieces fit together." --Thomas O'Brien

Rotner has emerged as perhaps the key figure in the day-to-day financial operations of the University.