Harvard Management Company's top dog, N.P. "Narv" Narvekar, felt the sting of a nearly 7% pay cut last year, pocketing $6.19 million after the Ivy League's richest endowment had a lackluster performance. The 6.9% slice came in the wake of Harvard's $50.7 billion endowment shuffling to its third-worst annual returns in two decades, as reported by The Crimson.
Despite the dip, spinning a positive yarn, departing Harvard Corporation bigwig Paul Finnegan, chair of the board that green-lights HMC executive salaries, tipped his hat to Narvekar for averaging a 9.2% return over six fiscal years and revamping the University's investing playbook. "Narv and his team have made tremendous progress repositioning the endowment and HMC for long-term success," Finnegan stated, according to The Crimson. While praising him, a $1.24 million deferral from 2022 fattened Narvekar and Chief Investment Officer Richard W. Slocum's total reported income on their W-2s for fiscal 2023.
The form 990 filings spilled the financial beans on Harvard's highest earners, painting a picture of steady earnings and pay hikes among its elite. Former Harvard President Lawrence S. Bacow cashed in around $1.3 million for the fiscal year 2023, holding steady from the previous year. Then-University Provost Alan M. Garber '76, who doesn't shy away from a pay raise, took home over $175,000 more than in 2022, wrangling a salary of $884,365 plus another $238,402 for the digs the University hooks him up with, said The Crimson.
Moving on from former Harvard President Claudine Gay, who left her post after a brief 185-day stint marred by allegations of plagiarism and criticism of her response to campus antisemitism, then-Provost Garber's earnings do not reflect his current salary parcels as interim president. Instead, his earnings snapshot comes from his provost's role, with Gay's compensation for her full last year as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences totaling $679,638. In the realm of Harvard's teaching stars, David J. Malan '99 remains the highest-paid active sage, banking $1.3 million, and business school professors Rohit Deshpande and Walter C. Kester rake in upwards of $2 million each, the spike credited to jumping on the tenure faculty retirement lump-sum gravy train.
