Who is Harvard President Alan Garber and what is his salary?
Alan Garber, current president of Harvard, has been making headlines recently due to his stance against the Trump administration
Alan Garber, current president of Harvard, has been making headlines recently due to his stance against the Trump administration’s efforts tp revoke the college's Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) and deny it up to $2.3 million in federal grants.
Who is Alan Garber?
Born in 1955 in Rock Island, Illinois, to a Jewish family, Garber’s association with Harvard has spanned well over five decades. After passing out from Rock Island High School in 1973, he then went on to graduate summa cum laude from Harvard with an AB in Economics in 1976 and an AM in Economics in 1977. In 1982, he further earned a PhD in Economics from the same university, along with receiving an MD with research honors from Stanford University School of Medicine in the same year. This was followed by his employment as a faculty member at Stanford University from 1986 to 2011.
Graber then joined Harvard as provost and chief academic officer in 2011. He took over as the university’s interim president on January 2, 2024 following then-president Claudine Gray’s resignation amid concerns over her handling of pro-Palestinian and antisemitism sentiments on campus. Owing to his proven leadership and conflict management skills, he was named president on August 2, 2024.
Harvard’s official website currently describes Garber as, “the Mallinckrodt Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School, a Professor of Economics in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Professor of Public Policy in the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management in the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. An economist and physician, he studies methods for improving health care productivity and health care financing.”
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Garber’s earnings and recent pay decision
Though Garber’s exact salary for FY2025 remains undisclosed, according to Harvard’s most recent publicly available tax filing, he earned more than $1.1 million a year in compensation as provost. In order to deal with the drastic cuts in university budget due to the freezing of federal funds, Garber recently announced his decision to take a voluntary 25% cut in his paycheck. Several senior administrators have also agreed to follow in his footsteps and take voluntary cuts in pay to ease the university’s financial burden.
In other cost-cutting measures, Harvard froze all staff hiring in March, urged schools to reduce discretionary spending, paused taking up multi-year commitments, and halted capital projects. Merit-based pay raises for faculty and union staff for FY2026 are to be discontinued, according to an announcement made in April, and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has been instructed to create backup plans to deal with budget shortfalls. About 80 faculty members across various academic units have pledged 10% of their salaries to Harvard for up to a year if they continue to resist fiscal threats from the federal government.
Garber had last taken a voluntary 25% pay cut in 2020 to deal with the financial blowback faced by the university due to COVID-19.
By Stuti Gupta
