The Harvard Management Company, a university subsidiary that supervises Harvard's $19-billion endowment, paid a total of more than $100-million in salary and bonuses to its six highest-paid employees in 2003, the company announced last week. The two top earners received salary and bonuses of about $35-million each, twice the size of the largest individual compensation packages in 2002.

Some Harvard alumni, who have called the prior years' compensation by the management company "inappropriate, indefensible, and corrosive to the values of the university," were quick to denounce the latest payments as well.

William Strauss, an alumnus in the Class of 1969, said he and his fellow critics have asked Harvard to hold an open forum on the campus, where students and faculty and staff members could discuss "whether the payments reflect the values of the university and whether Harvard should ever pay $35-million to anyone for anything."

Along with the data, Harvard also released a letter indicating that the management company's board plans some changes in its compensation policies. The changes would "constrain" the maximum annual pay of individual managers, the letter said, but Harvard did not provide details.

Mr. Strauss was one of seven alumni to sign an impassioned critique of the company's compensation policies in a letter last November to Harvard's president, Lawrence H. Summers. In that letter and in an interview on Friday, Mr. Strauss noted that $35-million is about twice the amount that Harvard was trying to collect in alumni donations from his class as part of its 35th-reunion gift this year.

While stopping short of a call for a boycott on gifts, Mr. Strauss said the situation "does call into question whether alumni should contribute."

The management company oversees investments of the university's endowment. In 2003, the endowment had an overall return of 14.7 percent, compared with an average return of just 3 percent among the hundreds of colleges and universities that responded to a recent survey (The Chronicle, January 23). In some asset classes, Harvard earned returns of as much as 52.4 percent. The endowment, the largest of any university, is worth $19.3-billion.

The lucrative compensation paid to some employees of the management company has long been a point of controversy at Harvard, and in releasing the figures last week, the company sought to deal with the dispute. The payments reflect the money managers' performance in achieving results that exceed the general performance of the market, the company said in a statement. "Managers do not receive bonuses simply because the markets went up."

Jack R. Meyer, president of the company, said the compensation is not out of line. If Harvard had used external money managers over the past 10 years and achieved the same results, "it would have cost us roughly twice as much" in fees. Mr. Meyer was paid $6.9-million in salary and bonus in 2003.

The management company, a tax-exempt subsidiary of Harvard, is required to list the salaries of its president and five highest-paid employees on its annual tax return, which is a public document. Harvard said it was releasing the information earlier than May, when it usually files its taxes, because it had recently disclosed information on the endowment's performance, on which the bonuses were based.

The highest-paid employee in 2003 was Maurice Samuels, who received salary and bonus of $35.1-million. Mr. Samuels oversaw the university's foreign fixed-income fund, which had a return of 52.4 percent in 2003, versus 18 percent for a peer fund that is regarded as a benchmark for this asset category.

The second-highest-paid was David R. Mittelman, with $34.1-million. He oversaw domestic fixed-income assets, which returned 31.1 percent. The benchmark for that class was 17.3 percent.

The manager of foreign equities and of foreign equities in emerging markets, Jeffrey B. Larson, was paid $17.3-million. His investments in the former category earned a return of -2.8 percent, versus the benchmark return of -6.2 percent; in the latter category, he managed a return of 8.6 percent, versus 6.7 percent for the benchmark.

The company paid $7.6-million to Elizabeth A. Randall and $6.5-million to Shawn Martin, who worked in foreign fixed equities and domestic fixed equities, respectively.

Mr. Strauss said that Mr. Meyer's explanation was not satisfactory. If the compensation Harvard is paying to its money managers is less than the costs that other universities are paying to the outside parties managing their endowments, the alumnus said, then alumni at other institutions also "need to look at who's making money off of student endowments."

In the letter to Mr. Summers, Mr. Strauss and his classmates suggested that Harvard pay its money managers far less and use the money to benefit the current generation of Harvard students. Mr. Strauss is the co-author of Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, a book about young people born in the 1980s and 1990s.

Although Mr. Summers never responded to the letter, the treasurer of Harvard, D. Ronald Daniel, did. In a letter dated January 22 and made public by Harvard, Mr. Daniel, who is also chairman of the management company's board, said that "in view of this year's compensation figures," the board would re-examine its system and expected to "institute changes that would constrain the maximum annual compensation of individual managers."