Harvard has announced its replacement for Jack Meyer, the retiring head of the Harvard Management Corporation: Mohammed A. El-Erian, a bond fund manager from the “powerhouse” firm Pimco.

The Times casts the hiring of El-Erian as a “surprising choice,” noting that he’s little-known around Wall Street, is not a Harvard alum, and has no experience managing a stock portfolio.

The Globe has a downright weird take*; it headlines its coverage “Harvard Will Keep Disputed Pay Policy,” and buries the fact that Harvard announced Meyer’s replacement four grafs into the story.

My thoughts: The Times piece does a better job of raising the right questions here. It, too, notes that El-Erian’s pay package will be similar to Jack Meyer’s, and points out that Yale’s money manager, David Swenson—who may be even better than Meyer—was paid only about $1 million last year, a relative pittance. But Swenson is a rare breed, an extremely moral man with strong feelings about what people like him should be paid. He’s an exception in the business. Harvard’s still paying well below market rate.

But the Times stresses that El-Erian is a curious pick, and I think that’s right. It may be a reflection of how difficult it was for Larry Summers to find someone to take this job.

(One thing neither the Times nor the Globe points out: As the Times reported some months back, Summers, Bob Rubin, and Harvard treasurer James Rothenberg had originally tried to conduct this search by themselves, then gave up and handed it off to an executive search firm. Who found El-Erian?)

I suspect Summers likes El-Erian for several reasons. First, he spent 15 years working at the International Monetary Fund, a credential Summers would value, given his own experience in international economics.

Second, El-Erian is Egyptian, was educated in England, and now works and lives in the U.S. Summers would appreciate that international experience—it fits with his globalization push.

Third, and perhaps most important, as the Times notes (but rather far down in its piece), El-Erian will have a slightly different role than Meyer did. In addition to his job at HMC, he’ll be teaching at the Harvard Business School and will serve as “deputy treasurer” to the university, advising Summers on all sorts of financial matters.

It’s possible to read this as an expansion of Meyer’s role. I don’t. It feels to me more a reduction of the autonomy that Meyer enjoyed and, by all acccounts, insisted upon, an attempt to diminish another “every tub on its own bottom” fief. Yes, Summers is bringing El-Erian into the fold…but he’s doing so in a way that clearly establishes El-Erian’s subordinate position.

One has to wonder if this arrangement isn’t part of the reason why finding a replacement for Meyer took so long—and if Summers isn’t taking a calculated risk here, hiring someone who isn’t perhaps the most obvious candidate because that person will accept less autonomy than Meyer enjoyed.

But that is just speculation on my part….
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P.S. A vigilant reader informs that the reason the Globe played the story as it did was because they had already scooped the rest of the press and broken the story on Friday morning. Good for the Globe; bad for me for missing the original story.