Don’t Balance the Books on the Faculty

The wrong workers are paying for Harvard’s fiscal strain.

As the wider University has restructured programs and laid off staff in an era of turbulent finances, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences is looking to allay its estimated $365 million dollar structural deficit, a problem due in large part to the now-8-percent tax on endowment income. In this latest round of cuts, the FAS have announced plans to slash the funding for non-tenure-track faculty by 25 percent.

In doing so, Harvard has chosen to balance its books by cutting the people closest to its core mission. From a broader, University-wide view, more sensible cuts could be made that would not lead Harvard astray from its mission of providing a world-class liberal arts education.

Any reorganization is bound to be controversial, and choosing what has to go is thanklessly arduous. But in making these decisions, we urge the administration to take stock of Harvard’s extreme administrative bloat.

At the onset of the University’s three-year odyssey of political turmoil, Harvard had a three-to-one admin to faculty ratio, an imbalance difficult to justify amid financial strain. Instead of jeopardizing the University’s capacity to teach and research with excellence, money would be best found restructuring an administration that’s more than double the relative size of an average elite school, according to a 2023 report by the Progressive Policy Institute.

The downsizing of the Alumni Affairs and Development office was a good start. If there were 55 staff members that were laid off, it begs the question of why the office needed 450 members to begin with — that’s about as many staff as there were non-tenure-track faculty in 2023.

Yet, beyond this example, the sense prevails that Harvard is hesitant to cut its administration — or at the very least, is doing so with more restraint than it shows towards its academic staff.

When faculty are on the chopping block, the University swings the axe. When administrative staff are, the FAS hires the esteemed McKinsey to ostensibly perform a more meticulous trim.

That is the reverse of the caution that the University should exercise. Faculty have the foremost impact on the quality of education and the preeminence of Harvard’s research, while the administration is due for a pruning.

Letting go of so many faculty, coupled with the recent Ph.D. cuts, will hurt small departments the most. Weakening small departments will leave many of the intellectually adventurous with nowhere to go, undermining academic pipelines and diminishing Harvard’s mission of providing a liberal arts education. And if Harvard hopes to curb its careerism problem, it can hardly afford to gut the very departments most likely to cultivate intellectual curiosity for its own sake.

Schools across the country are cutting small departments. Harvard, with its money and prestige, must not become one of them.

If cuts are inevitable, the University can find better bang for its buck than removing our teachers.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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