Harvard Paid McKinsey $250,000 For FAS Consultation, Internal Documents Show

Harvard paid McKinsey & Company at least $250,000 to consult on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ staff restructuring efforts, according to internal documents obtained by The Crimson.

The University paid McKinsey in three installments of $83,333 in August, September, and October 2025. The payments were explicitly tied to consultant services for the FAS’ Task Force on Workforce Planning, which was convened last spring as administrators began weighing a broad overhaul of the school’s administrative structure.

The records offer a rare window into the FAS’ dealings with the consulting firm — one of the world’s largest and most expensive — as it presses ahead with a sweeping staff consolidation plan.

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

The FAS quietly hired McKinsey as the task force began studying how to restructure administrative operations across the school’s departments, centers, and institutes amid federal funding cuts and a projected budget shortfall.

Consultants spent months interviewing administrators and staff, according to one person familiar with the situation, as the task force considered a slew of potential administrative models.

McKinsey was on campus as recently as November, when at least one consultant made an appearance at a closed-door portion of the FAS’ monthly faculty meeting.

FAS administrators floated some of the staffing models at an all-staff meeting in December. At that meeting, they also estimated that the school’s 2,300 full-time staff positions cost about $300 million, nearly 17 percent of the FAS’ annual budget.

The final contours of the restructuring have only begun to crystallize in recent weeks. The task force has been quietly informing department chairs and administrators of a plan to “cluster” administrative operations across the FAS, a move that could ultimately eliminate as many as 25 percent of staff positions.

Under the proposed model, each cluster would have its own multi-unit administrator, rather than an individual department administrator for each unit, alongside shared staff for functions including human resources and finance.

Some potential clusters grouped Theater, Dance & Media with English; Celtic Languages & Literatures and Classics with Linguistics; and the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology with the Center for Brain Science. Other departments, including Philosophy, were left unclustered in preliminary plans, though final groupings have yet to be finalized.

Most layoffs are expected to take place this summer. But the layoff of the school’s three divisional administrative deans has already been confirmed.

The restructuring comes at a financially precarious moment for the FAS. The school is confronting a $365 million deficit and has already implemented a slew of austerity measures — including deep cuts to Ph.D. admissions and non-tenure track faculty budgets.

—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.