FAS Could Save Roughly $20 Million Annually After Staff Cuts

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences could save roughly $20 million annually from its staffing overhaul, FAS Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra said at a Tuesday faculty meeting.

The estimate puts a figure to the school’s structural savings from a staff restructuring partly aimed at curbing its $365 million budget deficit. It came after several faculty pressed Hoekstra on the specifics of the restructuring ahead of staff turnover later this month.

According to Hoekstra, the $20 million estimate reflects staff reductions, though streamlined administrative processes, attrition, and retirements could generate further savings.

The FAS convened a task force to reevaluate its staffing model in spring 2025, as the Trump administration froze nearly $3 billion in federal funding to Harvard. Over the course of months — and in conversation with top consulting firm McKinsey & Company — the school developed a structure that grouped academic units into “clusters” with some shared administrative functions, bringing layoffs to a close in August with roughly 165 roles eliminated.

At Tuesday’s meeting, faculty repeatedly asked Hoekstra for details on the restructuring’s financial impact.

“You didn’t mention anything about the financial implications of this,” Human Evolutionary Biology professor Daniel E. Lieberman ’86 said at the meeting, asking Hoekstra what the total savings were.

Hoekstra responded that there would be savings, though the FAS was still compiling the numbers.

But when Physics professor Jennifer E. “Jenny” Hoffman pushed for an estimate later in Tuesday’s meeting, Hoekstra provided the $20 million ballpark.

Faculty had less success asking Hoekstra for Harvard’s total payment to McKinsey.

East Asian Languages and Civilizations professor David L. Howell said he had heard estimates for the payout ranging from $250,000 to $28 million. Documents obtained by The Crimson this spring showed that Harvard paid the firm at least $250,000 for workforce planning services.

Hoekstra confirmed during the meeting that the school had consulted with McKinsey and said that many of the consultants were Harvard College graduates. (Molecular and Cellular Biology professor Sean R. Eddy, who was involved in the workforce planning efforts, confirmed to The Crimson in July that there were at least five McKinsey employees involved with either bachelor’s degrees or business degrees from Harvard.)

But when Hoffman asked her to share Harvard’s commitment to the firm, Hoekstra said she wasn’t aware of the figure.

“I personally don’t know it,” she said.

“Does Warren know?” Hoffman followed up, referring to FAS Dean of Administration and Finance Warren Petrofsky, who did not respond.

Seconds later, History professor Kirsten A. Weld asked whether someone could find out the figure and tell faculty. Both Hoekstra and Petrofsky remained silent.

FAS spokesperson James M. Chisholm wrote in a statement that Hoekstra “did not have the specific figure for the McKinsey engagement in front of her.”

“Her answer was not intended to suggest that the FAS does not keep track of its expenditures,” he added. He declined to comment on the school’s total commitment to McKinsey in a follow-up from The Crimson, saying the FAS did not publicly share vendor costs.

Faculty also questioned Hoekstra about the implementation of the staffing changes, which took place largely in July and August.

“Did the dean and/or McKinsey weigh the cost of alienating the hard-working staff who remain, but who have experienced enormous stress, loss of autonomy, and in many cases, the loss of valued colleagues and collaborators?” History professor Mary D. Lewis asked Hoekstra.

Hoekstra acknowledged that the process was “incredibly difficult” and said administrators had worked to make sure they “treated every staff member with dignity.”

“There’s a lot of repair work that we need to do with our community,” she said. “That’s something we’re thinking about very carefully, about how to rebuild trust.”

English professor Glenda R. Carpio, who was on the task force that helped plan the overhaul, said the transition from more than a year of planning to weekslong late-summer layoffs left her “stunned.”

“Wasn’t there a kind of sense of the timeline?” Carpio said, adding that the implementation timeframe had been internally pushed several times through the planning process.

In June, FAS administrators told staff that they had not yet settled on a date for layoffs — though at least one College administrator later disputed their messaging. Larger waves of layoffs began in July and continued through August, with new hiring set to continue afterward.

Staff will move into their restructured positions in mid-October, Hoekstra and Petrofsky confirmed in a Tuesday presentation on the restructuring.

They also introduced two new bodies to oversee administrative services, part of an effort to simplify a system that had more than 1,500 unique job titles and upwards of 60 separate human resources, financial, and administration systems.

The first, the Administrative Services Governing Board, would use “performance data, risk considerations, and feedback from academic and administrative users” and advise “on service priorities, performance expectations, major policy changes, and strategic investments.”

An accompanying Administrative Services Advisory Council will provide “a structured channel” for FAS affiliates to “offer feedback on the effectiveness of FAS administrative services.” Those services would be measured based on several metrics, Hoekstra said, including speed, volume, and satisfaction.

But Hoekstra acknowledged that the transition to the new structure would not be smooth.

“The new administrative structure is not yet in place, important details are still being worked out, and the benefits of the change are not yet visible,” she said.

—Staff writer Abigail S. Gerstein can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at abbysg.97. Follow her on X @abbysgerstein.

—Staff writer Amann S. Mahajan can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at amannsm.38. Follow her on X @amannmahajan.