University Chooses New Finance Chief

Former Director of the University’s Office of Budgets and Financial Planning Dan Shore was named Harvard’s vice president for finance and chief financial officer on Monday.
In addition to his official position, which he had held since 2003, Shore had been serving as Harvard’s acting CFO since Elizabeth Mora’s abrupt departure last May.
After Mora’s resignation, University President Drew G. Faust said in an interview that she was unsure whether the position would ever be filled again, in light of the recent creation of the position of executive vice president.
And last month, Faust said that the decision whether or not to appoint a new CFO would be left to the new executive vice president, Edward C. Forst.
According to a press release, Shore, who will report to Forst, “will be responsible for overseeing a broad array of activities encompassing financial planning, analysis, operations, and compliance.” Shore will also serve on the board of the Harvard Management Company, which is responsible for maintaining the University’s endowment.
“It’s an incredible privilege to support Harvard’s extraordinary community of faculty and students,” Shore said in the release. “I look forward to working closely with Ed Forst, and with my colleagues across the University, to develop financial strategies that can help us realize our increasingly ambitious objectives.”
Last April, staffers in Mora’s office were notified by e-mail that she would leave Harvard in mid-May. With no explanation given for the sudden nature of the announcement, her staff expressed confusion.
The University remained notably silent on the issue, and both Mora and Shore repeatedly refused requests for interviews. The resignation came at a time of increasing turnover in Harvard’s highest administrative positions.
Shore previously served as a consultant at McKinsey & Company, where he worked with clients in the fields of higher education, technology, and consumer products. He had also been a corporate lawyer at
the Boston-based firm Nutter, McClennen & Fish, LLP.
Shore attended Duke as an undergraduate, where he studied psychology and political science. He also has a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from the University of Virginia.
In his time at Harvard, Shore has worked on improving the University’s budgeting process, and on implementing planning initiatives such as “the renewal and expansion of Harvard’s campus, the more intensive pursuit of cross-faculty academic collaborations, the consideration of how to optimize the use of endowment funds, and preparations for an eventual campaign,” according to the release.