BUZZ
Key Takeaways
- Former Harvard President Claudine Gay received $1.5 million in 2024, following her resignation due to plagiarism and antisemitism controversies, surpassing her prior salary of $1.3 million.
- Harvard's current president, Alan Garber, earned over $1.6 million in his first full year, with other senior staff also receiving seven-figure salaries; these figures were revealed in the university's Form 990 filings.
- Despite plagiarism allegations and criticism related to campus antisemitism, Gay retained her tenured faculty position and will return to teaching at Harvard, starting in fall 2026.
Harvard University paid former president Claudine Gay over $1.5 million in 2024 after her resignation amid plagiarism and antisemitism scandals.
This is more than the $1.3 million she made the previous year, “which spanned the end of her term as Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean and all six months of her presidency,” The Harvard Crimson reported.
Harvard’s current president, Alan Garber, earned more than $1.6 million in 2024, which was his first full year in the role.
“Several other senior administrators and faculty members also received seven-figure compensation packages,” according to the student newspaper.
These figures were disclosed in Harvard University’s Form 990 tax filings for fiscal year 2025.
However, they do not account for President Garber’s voluntary 25 percent pay cut for fiscal year 2026.
Garber has refused to comply with the Trump administration’s demands concerning DEI and antisemitism. Instead, the university will continue to lose hundreds of millions in federal funding.
Gay resigned as president in January 2024 over plagiarism allegations and intense criticism over her response to campus antisemitism.
Despite facing plagiarism allegations in nearly half of her published works and widespread criticism for her apathetic congressional testimony on antisemitism, Gay never lost her tenured position, The College Fix previously reported.
Just over a year after resigning as president, she returned to the faculty as a professor of Government and of African and African American Studies.
The former president is set to teach a fall 2026 course titled “What is a University?: Purpose and Politics in Higher Education,” The Fix reported.
The course examines Harvard as a case study to help students understand the social and political pressures influencing their school.
She will also co-teach a class on “racial domination and contestation” and another class on “African American Politics.”
The high compensation at elite universities is not limited to Harvard.
A recent investigation by The Center Square found that some “private nonprofit universities that receive government funding pay some of their top leaders millions of dollars and one even received a $20 million longevity bonus.”
Amy Gutmann, the former President of University of Pennsylvania, received nearly $23 million in 2022, including a $20 million deferred compensation payout after 18 years.
Current UPenn President Larry Jameson earned over $5 million in a recent year.
Meanwhile, “colleges can obscure the total compensation of their top leadership with agreements that delay part of their salary payments until the end of their tenures. The schools have purportedly used it as a retention tool to keep their presidents from going elsewhere, but it can also hide their true salaries for years,” The Center Square reported.
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