HUCTW Slams Deming’s Plan to Cut Back-Office Functions Before Student Programming

Harvard’s largest staff union criticized Harvard College Dean David J. Deming on Wednesday for remarks at a recent open forum in which he said he would target administrative operations before student-facing programming as the College weighs cuts tied to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ $365 million structural deficit.

In a letter to Deming, FAS Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra, and Dean for Faculty Affairs and Planning Nina Zipser, the executive board of the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers wrote that Deming’s comments were “dismissive and demeaning” and rested on “misleading claims rather than concrete evidence.”

At the April forum, Deming described certain back-office functions — including processing expense reports, vendor payments, and travel — as “things you would never really know or care about, frankly,” and called them “the first places” he would look for savings.

He did not announce staffing cuts, but a sweeping FAS administrative restructuring set to begin this summer is expected to result in layoffs.

Union leaders wrote that FAS support staffing has declined roughly 10 percent over the past year through attrition and a prolonged hiring freeze, and that further cuts would compound strain visible at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which laid off 25 percent of its HUCTW staff in October.

“This work is only ‘invisible’ when it is functioning,” they wrote. “The moment it is disrupted, it becomes urgently and inconveniently visible to everyone.”

College spokesperson Jonathan Palumbo wrote in a statement that “Dean Deming made it clear that while no decisions have been made, his priority is maintaining the student experience and realizing cost-savings through efficiencies and operational adjustments.”

Palumbo also pointed to Deming’s statement at the forum that he would try to “save” jobs and minimize the impact on Harvard undergraduates.

“Anything I can do that will save jobs and save the student experience, I’m going to try,” he said.

But HUCTW organizer Carrie Barbash said members read the remarks as foreshadowing layoffs.

“It read to most people who read it on our end — and our members who read it and others who read it — as being about layoffs,” she said.

The letter also disputes the financial premise of the College’s planning. At the forum, Deming said the federal endowment tax — raised to eight percent last summer — “blew a hole of roughly $100 million per year in the FAS budget” and described it as a fixed, recurring cost.

HUCTW leaders pushed back, noting the tax applies only to realized capital gains and that Harvard has substantial discretion over when to sell endowment assets. The University could delay sales, offset gains with harvested losses, or draw more on dividends and interest, they wrote.

“Presenting it as a static, ongoing budgetary ‘hole’ of $100 million assumes an implausible worst-case scenario in which Harvard’s highly skilled and well-paid asset managers are not doing their jobs,” they wrote.

A spokesperson for the FAS did not respond to a request for comment.

The letter is the latest in a series of escalating union actions. More than 3,600 HUCTW members, faculty, students, and affiliates signed a petition delivered to top Harvard officials this month calling on the University to halt layoffs.

The overhaul, announced in an April 9 email from Hoekstra, is being led by the Task Force on Workforce Planning in consultation with McKinsey & Company, and is expected to centralize functions including visa and payroll processing across the faculty’s more than 2,300 full-time staff.

HUCTW’s contract with Harvard expires at the end of June, though the union reached a tentative one-year agreement with the University earlier this month centered around a flat wage increase. Under the current contract, Harvard is required to consult with the union before layoffs, but HUCTW does not have the power to block them.

“Comments like those made by Dean Deming advance a divisive ‘us or them’ narrative — one that treats some members of our community as less valuable than others and therefore expendable,” HUCTW leaders wrote.

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

—Staff writer Noah A. Ferris can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on X @noahaferris.

—Staff writer Summer E. Rose can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at ser.85. Follow her on X @summerellenrose.