Harvard President Bacow, Wife Test Positive for Coronavirus (1)

Harvard University President Lawrence Bacow and his wife have tested positive for coronavirus, the school said Tuesday.

Bacow, 68, posted the news in a letter on the school’s website, saying they started experiencing symptoms on Sunday and contacted their doctors on Monday. Bacow, a former member of Harvard’s governing board and Tufts University president, became Harvard’s president in 2018.

Lawrence Bacow is greeted by his wife, Adele, in Cambridge in 2018.

Photographer: Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

“We will be taking the time we need to rest and recuperate during a two-week isolation at home,” he wrote. “I am blessed with a great team, and many of my colleagues will be taking on more responsibility over the next few weeks as Adele and I focus on just getting healthy.”

Universities across the country have been closing campuses, restricting access and taking other emergency measures to cope with the health crisis. The virus has infected more than 300,000 people globally.

The president of the University of Texas at Austin, Gregory Fenves, said earlier this month that his wife had also tested positive.

Harvard has forecast a decline in revenue and a slowdown in philanthropy due to the economic impact of the virus pandemic. Thomas Hollister, Harvard’s chief financial officer and vice president of finance, said Monday that the school has already begun reducing all discretionary, non-essential spending and may need to consider slowing the pace of capital projects in the future.

Even so, he said the school is well positioned to withstand a recession and the interruption of its operations, largely due to forward planning by endowment chief N.P. “Narv” Narvekar. The endowment lost 27% of its value in the last downturn.

(Updates with Harvard’s revenue forecast starting in sixth paragraph.)

To contact the reporter on this story:
Janet Lorin in New York at jlorin@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Sam Mamudi at smamudi@bloomberg.net

Melissa Karsh, Alan Mirabella

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