Leader forgoes campus salary

Derek Bok agreed to give up a year of his retirement to step in as interim president of Harvard University, and to heal the wounds left by the abrupt departure of Lawrence H. Summers.

It turns out he's also doing it for free.

"I just didn't need the money," Bok, 76, said in a brief telephone interview. "I wasn't doing this for compensation, but because the university needed help at a difficult time."

Bok reluctantly commented after the Globe learned that he is working without pay. University officials had declined to discuss his compensation.

Bok, who served as Harvard's president from 1971 to 1991 and returned to office in July. He wrote a book in 2003 warning about the commercialization of higher education, and he once wrote an essay critical of the increase in presidential compensation. But he described his decision as personal, rather than a symbolic gesture.

"I have a nice retirement income, and that's really all I need," Bok said. Because he retired from the Harvard faculty a couple of years ago, he is also not drawing any professorial salary. Bok is expected to step down in July to make way for a new president, who has not yet been named.

"I am sure that President Bok intended this to be a private act of philanthropy, a gift to Harvard," said Henry Rosovsky, a former Harvard dean. "I admire it, but it has nothing to do with appropriate levels of compensation for university presidents."

Two members of Harvard's governing board, the Corporation, did not respond to requests for comment. Bok said Corporation members mentioned the possibility of making a donation to a Harvard charitable fund in his name, but he did not know whether they would do so.

Bok has been known as unpretentious and resistant to the trappings of power. In his first stint as president, he drove a red Volkswagen Beetle to work, parked in a university garage, and walked through Harvard Yard to his office. This time around, he has declined to use the presidential car or to keep a driver, according to two people at Harvard with knowledge of the situation.

Bok's refusal to be paid is not unprecedented for a public figure. Governor Mitt Romney, a wealthy former businessman, does not draw a salary from the state. The Boston College president, the Rev. William P. Leahy, is a Jesuit priest with a vow of poverty.

Still, Bok's decision, at the nation's richest university, will probably make waves in academia as the skyrocketing salaries of college presidents draw increasing scrutiny.

The Chronicle of Higher Education's annual survey of presidential pay, released Monday, is headlined "The Million-Dollar President, Soon to Be Commonplace?"

Vanderbilt University's president, E. Gordon Gee, made $1.17 million in salary and benefits in 2004-05, according to the survey. Aram V. Chobanian made $945,654 while president of Boston University.

Like Bok, Chobanian was an interim leader. He filled in after BU revoked a job offer to Daniel S. Goldin before he served a day in office.

Chobanian, who retired, has told the Globe that he took in the same salary he would have received in his previous post, as dean of the medical school and provost of the medical campus.

Summers's compensation, $595,871 in 2004-2005, was not among the very highest.

In fact, the Chronicle found 112 presidents earning at least $500,000 in 2004-05, 53 percent more than the year before, although the survey included more universities this year.

In a 2002 essay in the Chronicle, Bok wrote that it was hard to justify high presidential salaries as an incentive for performance, because a university's progress is almost impossible to measure.

While the president's salary is a drop in the bucket for a university, he wrote, huge wages exacerbate tensions with faculty.

"If presidents are perceived by their faculties as distant figures with chauffeured limousines and out-of-scale salaries, they will hardly be credible when they exhort professors to spend less time outside their offices giving lectures or consulting for high fees," Bok wrote. "The influence of money is already too strong on many campuses."

Patrick M. Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, said it is almost unheard of for a former college president to criticize the rise in presidential pay, as Bok did.

"It is obviously a personal decision," Callan said of Bok forgoing pay. "But it seems to me refreshing in a world where we have people jumping from one institution to another for a few bucks."

"The message is not that we should all do it for free, but that there is a part of what we do that is really public service, and we shouldn't forget that."

And that's exactly the message that a third-year Harvard law student, Kate Riggs, took when told of Bok's decision yesterday.

"It shows a commitment to public service that would serve as a great reminder to students," said Riggs, 25, who said she is wrestling with whether to go into corporate law or public service after she clerks for the Maryland Supreme Court.

Bombardieri can be reached at bombardieri@globe.com.