Faculty of Arts and Sciences leadership unveiled potential administrative groupings for departments and centers in town halls with staff and faculty last week, offering the clearest look yet at a long-anticipated restructuring plan as its final contours begin to take shape.

The school’s Task Force on Workforce Planning quietly informed department chairs and administrators earlier this spring of a plan to consolidate academic units into groups with shared administrative functions, part of an effort to cut labor costs amid an estimated $365 million budget deficit.

Now, the plans — developed with help from McKinsey & Company — have been brought more fully into the open as the restructuring begins. The school already plans to lay off three high-level administrative deans and began recruiting internally for staff positions under the new administrative model last week.

In a recording of the Tuesday Division of Science town hall obtained by The Crimson, Dean of Administration and Finance Warren Petrofsky said that the task force grouped academic units’ administration based on physical proximity, technical needs, and intellectual alignment — though the groupings have evolved since they were presented to academic and administrative unit heads earlier this spring.

“There’s definitely been some iteration on these as the divisional deans have worked closely with chairs and directors,” Petrofsky said in the recording.

Under the current arrangement, nearly 40 units in the Arts & Humanities division would form 15 groups; 32 units in the Sciences division would form 12 groups; and 35 units in the Social Sciences division would form 16 groups, according to images of town hall slides obtained by The Crimson.

Some clusters have already seen changes. One earlier proposed grouping clustered Theater, Dance, & Media with English and Celtic Languages & Literatures with Classics and Linguistics. In last week’s slides, Theater, Dance, & Media was grouped with Music, while English with Comparative Literature and Celtic.

The chairs of the English, Classics, and Linguistics departments did not respond to requests for comment on the changes. TDM chair Derek Miller declined to comment.

Music department chair Alejandro Madrid-Gonzalez also declined to comment, but said TDM is no longer being clustered with Music — an indication that the groupings may still be changing even after the town halls.

Comparative Literature department chair Jeffrey Schnapp wrote in a statement that the change to the English, Comparative Literature, and Celtic grouping “was motivated by seeking a closer alignment between the three units, both spatial and in their academic mission.”

“Comparative Literature, by its very nature, stands at a crossroads between numerous fields and those include English and American literature, as well as Celtic. Located in the Dana Palmer House, we are situated right next door to the Barker Center and have several faculty with joint appointments in English,” he added.

Celtic department chair Joseph F. Nagy ’74 also confirmed the change.

Other groupings appear to have continued changing in recent weeks.

The Peabody Museum was presented to administrative leadership as part of a cluster with the Anthropology department the week before the town halls, according to an image obtained by The Crimson. But in the Social Science town hall last week, it was omitted from the groupings entirely. (The Division of Social Science website does not list Peabody, an anthropology museum, among its museums and centers.)

As under the initial plan, some units would remain ungrouped.

Philosophy, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, the Center for Jewish Studies, and the Harvard-Yenching Institute would remain standalone units in the arts and humanities; Physics, Human Evolutionary Biology, Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Statistics, and the Harvard Quantum Initiative would remain standalone in the sciences; and Social Studies, Anthropology, Psychology, Opportunity Insights, the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, and the Center for International Affairs would remain standalone in the social sciences.

The shifting groupings offer a window into the difficult balance FAS administrators are trying to strike: preserving academic alignment across departments and centers while consolidating the staff functions that have long operated at the unit level.

It is unclear when the new groupings will be fully finalized.

At the Division of Science town hall, FAS Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra said the final structures emerged after a lengthy process involving both the task force and affiliated “design teams,” which examined a slew of administrative systems within the FAS. In one case, she said, the teams tested a new reimbursement process.

Hoekstra again pointed to the school’s $365 million structural deficit as a source of financial strain. The FAS has already made a number of cuts to close the deficit — slashing non-tenure-track faculty budgets by 25 percent and sharply reducing Ph.D. admissions.

“The FAS has an approximately 350 million dollar structural deficit, which has given us few resources to absorb shocks from the outside — remember back this time last year, when we had lost all our federal funding — but also to make investments in our academic mission, like hiring faculty and graduate student admissions,” Hoekstra said in the recording.

—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.