FAS Committee Shares Initial Plans for Administrative Workforce Overhaul in Staff Meeting

Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra approved a plan to transfer administrative staff to centralized offices, likely shedding some positions in the process, according to a recording of a Monday all-staff meeting obtained by The Crimson.

The new model was introduced by members of the Task Force on Workforce Planning, which was convened by Hoekstra last spring to evaluate the school’s administrative structure and examine how to reduce labor costs in response to mounting financial strain.

The members said they would likely recommend transferring some, though not all, administrative responsibilities out of individual academic units to central offices and shrinking the number of FAS staff.

“I will say it is probably going to be a smaller number of staff ultimately that we end up recommending,” Katherine Gates, the chief of staff to the dean of FAS finances and a member of the task force, said at the meeting, which took place on Zoom.

FAS spokesperson James M. Chisholm wrote in an emailed statement that the goal of the restructuring is to create an administrative model that is more efficient for faculty, staff, and students.

“We expect there will be a smaller administrative workforce overall at the end of the process,” Chisholm added.

The committee still needs to iron out the final details of the proposal, including which job responsibilities will be moved to centralized offices, according to the administrators who spoke at the meeting. But Gates said Hoekstra had already greenlit the task force’s outline.

Ahead of the Monday presentation, the task force reviewed roughly 2,300 full-time positions at the FAS and solicited feedback through a survey sent to faculty and staff. The group found that the FAS has more than 1,500 unique job titles and more than 60 separate financial, human resources, and administrative systems.

Faculty and staff said on the survey that the organizational structure was convoluted, Gates said.

The 2,300 staff positions cost the FAS about $300 million, or approximately 17 percent of the FAS’s overall budget of $1.8 billion, according to the recording. More than 25 percent of FAS staff are “general administrators,” and 60 percent of FAS staff currently work within specific departments.

The FAS spends $228 million annually on faculty salaries and wages, according to a financial presentation at the FAS’s November meeting. In total, the FAS spends more than $810 million on compensation.

The proposed reworking of the FAS’ administrative structure is one of a litany of cost-cutting initiatives at the school, which is currently facing an estimated $365 million structural deficit. The FAS has already slashed graduate admissions, announced a flat budget for the next fiscal year, and stopped spending on non-essential capital projects.

At the November meeting, Hoekstra said the school’s expected expenses — much of which represents construction and building maintenance costs — have built up, leaving the school vulnerable to new financial pressures under the Trump administration.

“To state it bluntly, the way we have operated today has left us exposed,” Hoekstra said.

The task force also benchmarked the FAS’s administrative structure against corporations, including law and consulting firms, and other universities. Gates described the other firms as “places where essentially knowledge is what is sold, similar to a university where we are distributing our knowledge.”

The proposed overhaul would combine several administrative models, according to Gates. Under one proposed structure, which Gates called “hub and spoke,” staff would work within their departments and report to newly appointed FAS-wide administrators on specific issues. In another model, called “shared services,” administrative tasks like processing visas and payroll would be pulled completely from departments and delegated to central FAS offices.

Gates also described a similar but distinct “centers of expertise” model, which would lean on FAS-wide centers, like the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, to provide services to individual departments.

“The work that we do and the way that we do it — it’s complicated enough, and we’re such a complex environment that we can’t just dictate and do everything the same way,” Gates said. “What we learned was there’s some work that can be done in four different ways.”

Gates said the task force was also considering how artificial intelligence could be used to make administrative duties easier.

FAS dean for faculty affairs and planning Nina Zipser, who also spoke at the Monday presentation, reported that the University-wide hiring freeze reduced the number of staff positions in the FAS by several hundred. The freeze was announced last spring to reduce spending in the face of anticipated federal funding cuts and an endowment tax hike. Harvard has still allowed a limited number of new hires in the months since.

While the meeting centered around staffing issues, Gates added that FAS Chief Procurement Officer David Cho would be looking to make cuts in non-salary expenses — which make up roughly 50 percent of FAS expenditures.

Gates said the team will reopen the faculty and staff survey in January and potentially convene another town hall as it fleshes out the new administrative structures.

“It’s not a one and done. We will need to forever think about how to fine-tune our administrative models,” Zipser said.

—Staff writer Amann S. Mahajan can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on X @amannmahajan.

—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on X @williamcmao.

—Staff writer Veronica H. Paulus can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on X @VeronicaHPaulus.