Change Harvard’s Bottom Line

Harvard’s motto may be “veritas,” but our finances operate by a different creed: “Every tub on its own bottom.” Each of Harvard’s schools, divisions, departments, centers, and programs is expected to pursue the truth on its own dime.

This system of localizing assets and expenses helped build the Harvard of today. But as Harvard has grown and changed, that principle hampers our ability to adapt to twenty-first century challenges.

Our siloed financial structure produces inequities and inefficiencies. Some units draw on designated funds, thus insulating them from large annual fluctuations; others rely on an overburdened pool of general, unrestricted money. When Harvard confronts fiscal strain, every unit without a substantial “bottom” comes under pressure simultaneously.

To assure our intellectual and financial future, Harvard should move away from the tub-and-bottom model and toward a financial structure that better advances our shared mission.

Consider the Standing Committee on Theater, Dance & Media, which I chair. TDM receives funding from a wide range of sources. As a young program, we have a few small endowment and gift funds that support faculty research, productions, and other programming. Those funds form TDM’s “bottom.”

Then we rely on the largesse of units above and around us. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences pays TDM’s superb staff and faculty. Some visiting artists and field trips to view performances draw on grants to which instructors apply annually.

From the University’s perspective, TDM also incurs costs not reflected in our own budget. We do not, for instance, write monthly rental checks for classroom and performance space in Farkas Hall or the Harvard Dance Center, both of which we help manage.

In short, TDM is a tub with a tiny bottom, and thus operates only through the continuing generosity — and laborious financial planning — of multiple Harvard administrators.

Other departments and schools lead entirely different financial lives, with large endowments that cover core activities, faculty, and even staff. Such inequities make managing resources extremely difficult, particularly across so many varied and irregular funding systems.

What should be done to make Harvard more financially nimble and more unified?

First, we must use our endowment more efficiently. Most of Harvard’s more than 14,000 endowed funds are donor-restricted: they can be used only to support specific purposes.

Why has Harvard made little progress using the endowment more flexibly? One possible reason: the University doesn’t want to scare off donors by interpreting funding terms too liberally. Another is structural opacity. When endowment restrictions are spread across thousands of separate funds, it becomes difficult to identify which resources could be deployed more flexibly across the University.

Harvard should lobby to simplify the process for revising the terms of outdated endowments in Massachusetts. Additionally, the University should incentivize units to maximize their use of endowed funds and to seek ways to share excess income with underresourced units.

Second, Harvard must streamline procedures and manage shared burdens more collectively. Local units still manage many of the most arduous administrative tasks. Our system of appointment and promotion would make a Byzantine bureaucrat blush. The Task Force on Workforce Planning aims to improve some of these practices in FAS.

A major fundraising campaign for Ph.D. fellowships represents a similarly encouraging shared endeavor. Every year Harvard must pay for our doctoral students. A centralized effort to endow the tuition and stipends of some of these essential members of our community is welcome — and long overdue.

Finally — and somewhat counterintuitively — Harvard should loosen its centralized control over fundraising. Resource inequality at Harvard is not primarily the result of every program raising funds for themselves. Harvard manages development centrally, meaning our donors usually aren’t hearing directly from departments about our specific needs.

And while Harvard’s development office excels at raising large gifts, some alumni giving rates remain stubbornly low. Harvard Business School, for instance, reports over 90,000 alumni. Less than 10 percent of them donated to the HBS Fund in fiscal year 2024.

Harvard should grant every unit, including departments, access to information about their alumni and the freedom to pursue financial support directly. This would help us reach more alumni, while also ensuring units not prioritized centrally can fund our work as it actually exists, rather than rely on strict, outdated endowments and limited general operating funds.

Harvard’s financial culture keeps us divided, with every person and unit unsure of their status. This leaves us so concerned with protecting what we each have that we fail to secure what we all need.

People like to say that a budget is a statement of values. What values does a budget cluttered with irregularly sized tubs and bottoms express?

In John Bunyan’s celebrated allegory “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” which popularized the phrase “every tub must stand upon its own bottom,” the proverb evinces not virtuous self-reliance but arrogance and pride. Harvard erred by adopting Bunyan’s example of presumption as a precept.

Perhaps it’s time to remodel our finances after a more charitable and inclusive adage from a different seventeenth century preacher. “No man is an island, entire of itself,” warned John Donne — and no part of a university, either.

Derek Miller is a professor of English and the chair of the Standing Committee on Theater, Dance, and Media at Harvard.