Citigroup Taps Corporation Member

Financial giant Citigroup named Harvard Corporation member Robert E. Rubin ’60 its chairman yesterday. Rubin said last night that the new role would not affect his position on Harvard’s seven-member governing body, telling The Crimson that he expected to stay on the Corporation for the foreseeable future.

“It certainly should not interfere with my being involved at Harvard,” he said in a telephone interview. “I care a great deal about Harvard.”

Rubin, who has spent almost a decade at Citigroup, has drawn criticism in the past for disengagement from his role on the Corporation.

Rubin declined to speculate about what time commitment the new chairmanship would entail or how long he would remain in the post at Citigroup.

“When we pick a new CEO, then the board and the new CEO will have to decide what they want to do with respect to my continuing as chairman,” he said. “I’ll work with whatever the new board and CEO want to do.”

Rubin’s appointment came at an emergency meeting of the board of Citigroup, America’s largest financial services company. Former Chairman and Chief Executive Charles O. Prince III resigned yesterday after revelations that the firm had lost billions of dollars through bad investments.

Rubin worked at Goldman Sachs for 26 years, including two years as co-chairman of the firm, before joining the Clinton administration in 1993. He served as Treasury secretary from 1995 to 1999—when he was succeeded by his protégé Lawrence H. Summers—before going to work for Citigroup. Rubin joined the Harvard Corporation in April 2002.

Kennedy School of Government professor David R. Gergen, an adviser to Clinton while Rubin and Summers were in the executive branch, said the Citigroup position should not affect Rubin’s Harvard role.

“I speak to this with some experience of serving on university corporations,” said Gergen, who currently serves on Duke University’s Board of Trustees and previously sat on the Yale Corporation. “I just don’t see a serious conflict here at all.”

In addition to his positions with Citigroup and Harvard, Rubin is a co-chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and a founding member of the Brookings Institute’s Hamilton Project.

The departure of Summers as Harvard president in 2006 provoked speculation that Rubin, a close friend of Summers, might resign from his Corporation post. He denied such suggestions last year, calling them “unequivocally not true.”

“I know that he was deeply distressed by the closing months of the Summers administration,” Gergen said. “He was a very big supporter of Summers...but that’s just a wholly separate question.”

As the longest serving member on the Corporation after Senior Fellow James R. Houghton ’58, Rubin is next in line for the board’s leadership role, which falls to the body’s most senior member.

Houghton, 71, pledged last spring to continue as senior fellow, despite having said privately last year that he would retire after the search for Harvard’s president completed.

—Staff writer Clifford M. Marks can be reached at cmarks@fas.harvard.edu.