New trouble for Harvard as its new interim president is accused of a conflict of interest for being a board member of two major drug giants who earn more than $1 million a year – on top of his $900,000 salary

Harvard's new interim president is accused of having potential conflicts of interest because of his role on the boards of two major pharmaceutical companies, for which he receives $1 million annually.

Alan Garber makes more from his administrative positions than from his full-time gig as university provost, a position that paid him $946,000 in 2022.

The Boston Sphere explains that his salary increase is not unusual among professors, many of whom earn more from serving on the boards of major for-profit companies than from their university salaries.

But university governance experts say these roles could lead to increasing conflicts of interest, especially at companies in the medical sector, where the lines between university research and corporate interests can become blurred.

Garber's positions at health care companies have earned him more than $6.6 million since he arrived in Cambridge, according to the Globe.

Garber maintains long-term relationships with both companies. While still teaching at Stanford Medical School in 2005, he was hired by Alameda-based Exelixis Inc., which focuses on making cancer drugs.

In 2017, after leaving Stanford and moving to Cambridge — he has been acting as provost of Harvard since 2011 — he was hired by Boston-based biotech company Vertex.

According to the newspaper, Garber's earnings in administrative positions are at the high end of the spectrum of what his higher education peers earn from outside positions.

The closest comparison is reportedly current Cornell University President Martha Pollack, who has earned at least $1.4 million from her role on IBM's board of directors, which she accepted in 2018, a year after being appointed to her current function.

Michael Harris, a professor of higher education at Southern Methodist University in Texas, told the Globe that presidents often defend their extracurricular positions as ways to “build more connections for the institutions” or to secure grants.

“The critics would say it's much more about lining their personal pockets,” he added.

James Finkelstein, a professor at George Mason University, said about a third of top university presidents have joined the boards of publicly traded companies — not to mention private ones.

He added that he has not seen any evidence that the presidents' roles on these councils actually deliver tangible financial or other benefits to their respective institutions.

'If these companies become donors to the universities, we see no evidence of this. “If they make big research deals with the universities, we don't see any evidence of that,” he said.

“If they hire more graduates from these institutions, we don't see any evidence of that.”

Recent Harvard presidents have almost all held board positions at large, powerful companies, although some of them resigned their seats before being inaugurated.

With or without the additional millions of dollars, leadership positions at universities are widely believed to bring numerous material benefits – including, in Harvard's case, a stay at the landmark Elmwood House – also called Oliver-Gerry-Lowell House, after a number years ago. donors and contributors to the school and its architecture.

The Georgian-style mansion is just one of the properties Harvard uses to house its top executives. According to the Globe, Garber is currently staying in a 6,000-square-foot home paid for by the school.

Former Harvard President Claudine Gay agreed to resign in late December after months of criticism, including recently several dozen accusations of plagiarism in her academic work.

On December 27, Harvard University Board of Governors leader Penny Pritzker called Gay, who was on a family trip to Rome, and asked if she felt there was a way forward with her at the helm of the university .

Although the question was posed as an open question, Pritzker's implication was apparently clear, and the phone conversation ended with Gay's agreement to resign.

It marked a stunning turnaround after weeks of staunch public support for Gay from members of the Harvard Corporation, as the university's governing body is known, despite the unfolding scandals.

Gay wrote this in a New York Times last week op-ed that racial animus played a role in her ouster.

She revealed that she had received death threats and been called the n-word numerous times since making headlines in October after what was criticized as a serious lack of response to the barbaric Hamas attacks in Israel.

In the wake of former Harvard President Claudine Gay's resignation amid nearly 50 reports of plagiarism, the wife of Bill Ackman, who led the pressure campaign that led to Gay's ouster, is a target.

Business Insider last week launched an investigation into the billionaire's wife, Dr. Neri Oxman, which led to accusations of plagiarism in parts of her 330-page MIT dissertation; Oxman denies plagiarism, but admitted that he had omitted quotation marks despite providing the correct quotations.

The BI article examined some of Oxman's work, with examples in which she failed to place quotation marks around borrowed passages – despite providing appropriate references in the bibliography and elsewhere – in a desperate attempt to prove that American -Israeli designer had violated MIT's academic standards. – integrity standards.

The report highlights multiple cases of alleged plagiarism by Oxman, who became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2017, in which Oxman clearly lists the authors' names as references.

Oxman responded to the brutal accusations against her, admitting errors in the application of quotation marks but claiming she was correctly cited throughout the thesis.

“I was forwarded an email this morning from a reporter at Business Insider who noted that there are four paragraphs in my 330-page dissertation, 'Material-based Design Computation,' which I completed at MIT in 2010,” she wrote on X on Thursday.

'Where I have omitted quotation marks for certain works that I used. For each of the four paragraphs in question, I have properly credited the author(s) of the original source with references at the end of each of the topic paragraphs and on the detailed bibliographic end pages of the thesis.'

'However, in these four paragraphs I have not placed the subject language in quotation marks, which would be the correct approach to crediting the work. I regret and apologize for these errors.”

“Business Insider also identified one sentence in the dissertation in which I paraphrased Claus Mattheck and did not quote him,” she wrote. 'I should have given Mattheck a quote for the above sentence. I paraphrased from his book 'Design in nature: learning from trees, Springer 1998', which I have cited throughout my dissertation and properly attributed in the sections following the topic sentence. I deeply apologize to Mattheck for accidentally not quoting him when I paraphrased the above sentence.”

Meanwhile, the rest of the article delves into the private lives of Oxman and Ackman, highlighting Ackman's recent activism against anti-Semitism at Harvard, his alma mater, and his advocacy for Claudine Gay's resignation after dozens of accusations of plagiarism.