Deming Backs New Housing Day Fundraising Challenge Despite Uneven Results

Harvard College Dean David J. Deming defended the College’s inaugural Housing Day fundraising competition during an open forum Tuesday night, calling the disparities in donations across Houses “not ideal” but arguing the challenge left every House better off than before.

Adams House — Harvard’s most recently renovated upperclassman residence — brought in roughly $170,000 during the 24-hour campaign, more than 80 times the total raised by last-place Kirkland House, where Deming once served as faculty dean. Its haul also exceeded the combined total of the other 11 Houses.

The variation in earnings has prompted concerns over whether the competition risks deepening existing resource gaps between Houses. But Deming pushed back on the premise that the initiative set a problematic precedent, framing the challenge as a grassroots effort that would improve with time.

“If you want to ask former alums to give directly to the House, directly to the social life of the house, they’re not going to be as excited about giving to a pool if it gets distributed,” he said.

Deming stressed that every House ended up with more money than it would have had otherwise — and that the College would not reduce existing House budgets in response to the fundraising results.

“We’re also not cutting the budgets of the Houses,” Deming said. “House budgets will remain as they would have been.”

He added that all donations would go directly to Houses without the College taking a cut.

“One thing I’m sure of is that we are not at the College just skimming anything off the top,” he said. “It’s all going to the Houses.”

Deming said the College does not have concrete plans to address the fundraising disparities but would share resources with Houses that request help building alumni networks. He noted that Adams House has already offered to share its outreach strategies with other Houses.

“My hope is that in future years, and I do hope we do this again, it won’t always be the same House on top,” he said. “Houses that didn’t do as well as they had hoped this year are able to do better next year with a bit of time and advanced planning.”

Deming described the fundraising challenge as especially important given Harvard’s financial outlook, casting it as a way to generate new resources for student life at a time when budgets are under pressure.

“In a time of financial constraints, the Housing Day Challenge, I view, is a way to create something from nothing,” he said. “To build on the fact that there are a lot of alums who really care about their House community and want to support that.”

The fundraising push was part of a broader effort to revamp Housing Day, which was moved to after spring break for the first time since its revival in 2008 and expanded into a week of programming. Deming said the changes were designed to build momentum beyond a single day.

“When we did it before spring break, it was one day, it was right during finals, and then everyone disappeared,” he said. “It was really hard to build momentum.”

Deming said he considered this year’s Housing Day a success but declined to confirm whether the post-spring-break timing would continue next year.

He also acknowledged that the broader financial picture across the University contributed to the College’s push to find new revenue streams for Houses. Harvard has engaged in sweeping austerity measures over the past year — including a University-wide hiring freeze, layoffs across several schools, and cuts to graduate program admissions — as it navigates an ongoing confrontation with the federal government.

“I do think it’s very reasonable to expect some belt tightening ahead, but it hasn’t happened yet,” Deming said of the College’s budget.

He said his priority in preparing for potential cuts would be to preserve programming that directly serves students.

“My priority is and continues to be the student experience,” he said. “I’ve tried, whenever I can, when I think about ways we could make difficult choices with the budget, to do it in a way that preserves the sense of what a Harvard College education is.”

—Staff writer Sebastian B. Connolly can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at sbc.23. Follow him on X @SebastianC4784.