Tuesday, April 07, 2009

Harvard Presidency as a Part-time Job

One of my Harvard colleagues was struck by a sentence in yesterday's NY Times story about Larry Summers:
Among these insiders are Kenneth D. Brody and Frank P. Brosens, the founding partners of another hedge fund, Taconic Capital Advisors, for whom Mr. Summers did consulting work from 2004 to 2006.
Larry was president of Harvard until June 2006. Is it really possible that Larry did consulting work for a hedge fund during his famously controversial stint as head of Harvard? Or did the NY Times get the facts wrong?

Update: A reader more knowledgeable about the lives of university presidents than I am suggests to me that university presidents often sit on corporate boards and that consulting is no different. Perhaps so, but I am mildly surprised. Given the vast complexity of modern universities like Harvard, I would have expected (and I think I would have preferred) to pay the heads of these institutions enough so that they could focus all of their attention on university issues.