Harvard Talent Flees to the Private Sector

Plus, Israeli minister assails Tucker Carlson; Republican rift on entitlements; PCE

Harvard University as seen in a 2024 file photo taken by The Editors.

The risk that top intellectual talent will flee universities for private industry has been a running theme here.

In “A Nobel for Google,” I wrote:

People have started to realize that there is competition among institutions and choice for students, so prospective students put off by the campus chaos, antisemitism, and stifling ideological conformity of places such as Harvard or Columbia might choose instead to consider applying to, or attending, alternatives such as the University of Florida, Emory, Dartmouth, Vanderbilt, or the University of Chicago.

Yet there is a market for faculty talent, too, and there the choices include not only the academy but also industry. Just as physician-researchers sometimes leave academic medicine for pharmaceutical companies, the engineers, chemists, physicists, and computer scientists have choices, too. They can make careers in universities or in industry, or try to do both simultaneously. The worse the conditions become in academia—poisonous faculty politics, cancel culture, performative “wokeness,” the decline of meritocracy in favor of other values such as “equity” or bureaucracy—the greater the relative attraction of choosing to make a career instead at Google or some company that will be the next Google. Google parent Alphabet’s market capitalization is on the order of $2 trillion, which makes Harvard’s roughly $50 billion endowment look puny (sorry, President Alan Garber) by comparison.

Perhaps the risk of a talent exodus, “brain drain,” from academia to industry, will put some market pressure on higher education to create conditions that are conducive to scholarship.

In “Wisdom from Harvard’s new president,” I wrote: “the competition for talent extends beyond students. Scientists nowadays might prefer to go work for a pharmaceutical company or a Silicon Valley startup instead of a Harvard lab or the tenure track.”

And in “Harvard Moves to Prevent Professors From Fleeing to Industry,” I wrote, “Harvard’s leadership is concerned enough about the possibility of a talent exodus that it is revising its rules to make it easier for professors to work in the private sector without quitting their Harvard positions altogether.The Harvard provost’s office recently okayed the creation of a new category of academic appointment, to be known as a Catalyst Professor, that will allow faculty members to split their time between Harvard and the private sector.”

Now Harvard Magazine, the official if quasi-independent university alumni publication, has come in on the story with a dispatch headlined “Where The Grass Is Greener: Leaving academia to advance biomedical research.” The magazine’s Jonathan Shaw interviews three professors who moved into the private sector and offered detailed accounts of their frustrations with Harvard’s inflexible, slow, and vast bureaucracy.

Michael Mina was a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “Despite bringing in $10 million in philanthropy and grants, I couldn’t get the school to bend and allow me to hire somebody who could help even with scheduling,” he says. “A donor wanted to give $2 million to my lab, but only wanted to allow a maximum 10 percent to go to indirect cost recovery. And the school declined to receive the $2 million because they wanted at minimum, I believe it was 20 percent. That was one of those moments, when I just said ‘What the hell am I doing?’ … here’s my home department, you know, not allowing my laboratory to take on a $2 million gift. I understand they don’t want to set bad precedent that’s going to make the institution have difficulty getting enough funds in the long run. But there are times when academia should be more flexible. I found that the school was unable to realize that.”

“The paylines of Ph.D. students and postdocs haven’t really changed, and certainly haven’t kept up with inflation. It’s hard to live on $60,000 in Boston. And industry is offering people $120,000 to $150,000 right out of the gate with a Ph.D., if not $300,000,” Mina says. “The average professor is going to have an increasingly difficult time getting the best postdocs because they’re going to go to Biogen, they’re going to go to Genentech, they’re going to go to Thermo Fisher, where they get paid in a way that seems to satisfy them, and they feel like they have opportunity. We’re already seeing that happen.”

Douglas Melton quit a University Professorship at Harvard to go work at Vertex, where Harvard president Alan Garber is a director. “Principal investigator biologists now spend up to 40 percent of their time—it’s a shocking number, 40 percent of their time—writing grants,” says Melton, who is still involved at Harvard in a reduced capacity. “In industry, the funding allows for very rapid change. There’s no writing a grant and waiting six months to see if it could get funded, and then waiting another six months for the university to make arrangements to receive the funds. The speed with which you can move into a new area is not comparable.” He says that in the private sector, “Everything gets done much quicker.”