Prof Dogged by Dung Is Demoted

Andrei Shleifer ’82 isn’t the only Harvard economics professor to have been stripped of his endowed title after allegedly getting his hands dirty.

Martin L. Weitzman, the Harvard faculty member accused of stealing horse manure from a Rockport, Mass., farm in April 2005, has also recently lost his title as the Ernest E. Monrad Professor of Economics.

While the 2005-2006 Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) course catalog listed Weitzman as holding the Monrad professorship, he now appears in Harvard’s directories simply as “Professor of Economics.”

Losing an endowed professorship usually does not entail a salary cut, but it is perceived as a drop in prestige.

Former Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby, who served as FAS’s chief through last June, declined to say yesterday why Weitzman is no longer listed as the Monrad professor.

“Consistent with its practices, the FAS is not in a position to comment on any internal personnel matter involving a member of its faculty,” Kirby wrote in an e-mail.

Contacted at his Gloucester, Mass., home Sunday, Weitzman said, “I just don’t want to comment on it.”

And Ernest E. Monrad ’51, who donated the money to establish the professorship that Weitzman held, also declined to discuss the matter.

Monrad is the co-founder of Northeastern Investment Management, a Boston firm that supervises over $1.3 billion in assets.

Morton Keller and Andrew B. Schlesinger ’70, both historians who have studied Harvard, wrote in separate e-mails that they could not recall previous instances where professors had been stripped of their titles.

Shleifer, who paid a $2 million settlement but admitted no wrongdoing after the Justice Department sued him for allegedly defrauding the U.S. government, recently lost his title as the Whipple V. N. Jones Professor of Economics, apparently as part of the administration’s punishment. The change first appeared in Harvard’s online directories last Friday.

Harvard also paid $26.5 million last year to settle a five-year-long lawsuit over Shleifer’s work advising a U.S.-funded program to privatize the Russian economy during the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union.

—Javier C. Hernandez contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Daniel J. T. Schuker can be reached at dschuker@fas.harvard.edu.