Faculty Awaits Budgeting Specifics

While a global financial crisis underscores the vulnerability of the University’s coffers, “belt-tightening” has become an administrative catchphrase—but departmental leaders say that confusion over the precise nature and extent of cuts will remain until top administrators offer more specific information.

That information may become available today when the Faculty of Arts and Sciences convenes for a continued discussion of the economic crisis, several department chairs said.

Some clarification is certainly on the way. In a letter circulated to Department chairs yesterday afternoon, top FAS officials announced several cost-cutting measures that included a hold on searches for tenure-track faculty and a stay on any salary raises for faculty and non-union staff. The letter urged department leaders to keep news of the cuts quiet until their announcement at today’s meeting.

But beyond Faculty hiring—which was already in a “pause” period as of April—guidelines for assessing research priorities and other academic costs at a departmental level are still unavailable, making the implications of the financial crisis difficult to understand for departmental leaders trying to pin down what will need to go.

Chair of the linguistics department Gennaro Chierchia said the volatility of the financial situation has kept him and many of his colleagues from a complete understanding of where they need to make cuts.

“Even at the top level, the situation is changing so quickly,” he said “That’s why everybody is putting off decisions.”

Some help with the decisions is to come from the Priorities Committee, an ad hoc body that will function until the completion of the Faculty’s budgetary plans in March. Smith will announce the members of the committee at today’s meeting, according to FAS spokesman Robert P. Mitchell.

In the interim, the physics department has been scrutinizing “every single element” of its departmental budget with “great diligence,” according to department chair Christopher W. Stubbs.

Stubbs declined to say what exactly the Physics department would consider cutting under financial duress. He said the department is in a largely evaluative stage, deferring concrete decisions until more numbers are known and instead considering alternatives that may become necessary in the future.

“I wouldn’t say we’re currently making decisions,” he said. “We’re trying to identify what costs we could potentially defer.”

Last week, Harvard announced that its endowment—the largest in higher education—has fallen 22 percent from its June 30 value of $36.9 billion, marking the endowment’s largest decline in modern history.

Despite the lack of specific guidance, the linguistics department has taken Smith’s request for prioritization seriously during its budgeting process, Chierchia said.

The department will likely have to keep a less-than-ideal curricular program that overlaps undergraduates and graduate courses, and may also be unable to offer an interdisciplinary General Education course that had been in the works, Chierchia said.

“So far, we are stretched so thin, that we simply couldn’t be asked to do anymore,” he said.

Richard Tuck, chair of the Committee on Degrees for Social Studies, said he hopes to preserve “critical” courses such as Social Studies 10 and its junior tutorials.

According to Tuck, today’s meeting will likely provide more details for departments. Stubbs said he thinks the administration will soon undertake a conversation with departments to discuss budget targets.

“I think we face hard choices together in the near future,” he said.

—Staff Writer Esther I. Yi can be reached at estheryi@fas.harvard.edu.