Houghton Retires As Corning Chairman

A member of the University’s highest governing board technically retired yesterday from his post as chairman of Corning, Inc., but his day-to-day responsibilities will not change at the New York-based technology company or at Harvard.

The Harvard Corporation’s senior fellow, James R. Houghton ’58, who is leading the search for University President Lawrence H. Summer’s successor, will remain Corning’s non-executive chairman of the board.

“In a sense, nothing has changed,” Houghton said in a brief interview yesterday.

Corning spokesman Daniel F. Collins added, “He still has an office, he retains all his duties, and he keeps all of his assistants. He is simply no longer an active employee of the company.”

What will change for Houghton is his compensation. Corning will no longer pay Houghton an annual salary, but will instead give him a retainer along with his pension, according to Collins. The switch is intended to comply with IRS regulations that forbid a person from receiving a salary and a pension at the same time, Collins said.

Houghton served as the company’s chairman and CEO from 1983 to 1996. He came out of retirement and took the reins at Corning again in 2002 after Corning’s sales were cut in half during the telecommunications crash the previous year.

“When I returned in 2002, I said I did not have a timetable for retirement, but I did say that I would retire from active employment when the time was right,” Houghton, who had already ceded his role as CEO last May, told the Associated Press yesterday. “The time now is right.”

The Houghton family has deep ties to Corning. Houghton’s great-great grandfather founded the company in 1851, and a total of seven Houghtons have served as Corning’s chief executive.

Former Dean of the Faculty Henry Rosovsky, who sat on the Corporation from 1985 to 1997, said Houghton’s charge to lead the presidential search is not a full-time commitment that would preclude him from taking on duties outside Harvard.

“It’s chairing a search committee—a very important one—but not a full-time occupation,” Rosovsky said.

During the past four years, Houghton made fast and dramatic changes to the company’s structure, closing more than a dozen plants and cutting the number of employees almost in half—moves that revived the use of his unflattering nickname, “Dark Angel.”

Houghton defended the changes in a 2003 interview, noting that “laying somebody off is...a nasty process.”

“But, you know, in the long run—whether it’s worldwide or for this community—the overall health of the enterprise is what’s important,” he said.

Houghton suffered a near-fatal pedestrian accident in 1993, but stayed at the helm of Corning for three more years before making his first retirement.

When he stepped down in 1996, Houghton said, “I just figured after 13 years that this was the time to do it.”

Corning is one of upstate New York’s largest and oldest employers and produces 55 percent of the world’s LCD glass.

—Material from Associated Press wire reports was used in the reporting of this story.

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

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