Summers Snags 7 Percent Pay Hike

University President Lawrence H. Summers might have raised a ruckus over women in science during the 2005 fiscal year, but Harvard raised his pay nonetheless. Summers’ salary increased to $563,119, marking a 7.7 percent hike, according to tax records released this week.

The total amount paid to Summers—including his benefit plan, his expense account, and his subsidy for housing near Washington, D.C.—summed to $667,157, Harvard reported.

The president’s pay provoked a protest this past July from then-Harvard Corporation member Conrad K. Harper. “In my judgment, your 2004-2005 conduct, implicating, as it does, profound issues of temperament and judgment, merits no increase whatever,” Harper said in his resignation letter.

Harper was objecting to Summers’ salary for the current year, which Harvard will not have to report until next spring. But Harper’s letter said that Summers had received a three percent raise for the 2006 fiscal year.

Despite the drama over the president’s pay, Summers still remains one of the lowest earners among Ivy League chiefs. His salary ranked sixth among the eight Ivy presidents in a 2005 survey conducted by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

And in comparison to chief executives at for-profit firms with revenues comparable to Harvard’s, Summers was paid a pittance.

The University reported total revenues of $4.994 billion last year. If Harvard were a for-profit firm, it would place 430th on the Fortune 500 list of largest companies, seven spots behind RadioShack and 13 spots ahead of Hershey.

RadioShack paid its CEO $1.5 million in 2004. The compensation of Hershey’s CEO reached $9.9 million, according to Mercer Human Resource Consulting.

Summers’ spokesman, John Longbrake, declined to comment on compensation matters yesterday.

Summers’ salary rose at a faster rate than Provost Steven E. Hyman’s pay. The University’s second-highest-ranking employee earned $387,532 in compensation, up 4.2 percent, and he received an additional $29,407 contribution to his benefit plan.

Harvard’s highest-paid investment managers, meanwhile, took huge cuts in compensation. David Mittelman and Maurice Samuels earned $17.9 million and $16.8 million, respectively. Both bond managers earned slightly over $25 million in the 2004 fiscal year.

Mittelman and Samuels left Harvard last September to join a private hedge fund.

The tax filings also include information about the University’s lobbying activities on a wide range of issues, from Medicare and Medicaid to legislation affecting campus-fire prevention.

In a new item on the school’s lobbying agenda, Harvard asked lawmakers to change the statutes governing Housing and Urban Development (HUD) subsidies.

The push stems from Harvard’s plan to relocate residents of the Charlesview Apartments in Allston and to use the site for a new arts center.

Harvard wants to transfer the Charlesview residents—and their federal subsidies—to a new housing facility a mile away on land currently owned by the University. But Harvard officials believed that old HUD guidelines might bar long-term subsidy transfers, according to Senior Director of Federal and State Relations Kevin Casey.

Congress passed legislation this past November that will allow the long-term transfer of subsidies from “physically obsolete or economically non-viable” housing facilities to new projects.

—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.