Nearly Half of Phillips Brooks House Staff Positions Impacted by FAS Restructuring

The Phillips Brooks House was the hardest-hit Harvard College unit by share of staff positions in a recent round of layoffs tied to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ sweeping administrative overhaul, with 11 of its 23 roles either laid off or offered new positions, according to a document obtained by The Crimson.

The cuts amid a broader reorganization that effectively ends the Center for Public Service and Engaged Scholarship’s role as the College-wide hub for public service. Philips Brooks House will now fall under the Dean of Students Office, according to a plan presented to College staff earlier this month. Meanwhile, the Mindich Program in Engaged Scholarship will move fully into the Office of Undergraduate Education — dispersing programs previously housed under one center across multiple offices.

The cuts also mark the clearest test yet of College Dean David J. Deming’s April pledge to preserve student-facing programming over “back office” functions as the FAS made cuts.

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

The restructuring represents a reversal from a yearslong effort to expand Phillips Brooks House’s role within the College. In 2019, then-College Dean Rakesh Khurana established a faculty-director position as part of a push to further integrate public service into academics.

That director, Julie Rueben, has also now left the Philips Brooks House. Reuben stepped down June 30 after serving an additional year beyond her second three-year term, in a departure she said was unrelated to the restructuring.

Reuben, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told The Crimson that she had initially planned to step down in 2025 to focus on her academic career but stayed for an additional year to ease the transition from Khurana to Deming. Her departure has left the Center without a faculty, and the College has not announced plans to appoint a replacement.

FAS spokesperson James M. Chisholm declined to comment on the layoffs, citing a policy against discussing personnel matters.

“Given the sensitivity of this process and our legal and labor obligations, we intend to publicly release data on workforce impacts following the completion of the administrative transition currently underway,” Chisholm wrote in a statement.

The Crimson’s analysis draws on disclosures the University is required to provide some affected workers under the Older Workers Benefit Protection Act. The disclosures list the job titles and ages of employees within an impacted unit and whether they were selected for termination.

The disclosures track decisions about employees’ existing positions, not their ultimate employment status, and some employees whose positions were affected may have since been hired into new roles.

At Phillips Brooks House, the 11 selected positions include six director or assistant director roles. Three of those six appear to have been laid off, while the other three were given the option to stay on in a new role. The five remaining selected positions span administrative, financial, and student-development functions.

Taken together, Reuben’s exit and the range of positions affected raise questions about the future of both lasting consequences for both the Center’s internal operations and its student- and community-facing programming.

In addition to the Phillips Brooks House Association, the Center has historically overseen the Mindich Program in Engaged Scholarship, Pathways to Practice, and a Student Engagement & Leadership team.

“There’s still a lot that’s unknown,” said Maria Dominguez Gray, executive director of PBHA, of the restructuring.

But she said she remained confident that PBHA, the Center, and the DSO would continue supporting students amid the uncertainty.

“What I feel like I do know is that the folks at the DSO, the PBHA, the Center are committed to showing up for our students and our mission,” she said. “We’re going to need to be figuring that out together over the next few months.”

Chisholm confirmed that the Mindich Program in Engaged Scholarship — previously jointly overseen by the Center and the OUE — will now report directly to the OUE.

“Mindich Program courses will continue this year and in the years ahead,” he wrote. “Mindich courses for this fall will be supported through the Office of Undergraduate Education, and we anticipate a very smooth transition given the historical involvement of the OUE in the program.”

Chisholm separately confirmed that all pre-orientation, summer and winter programs would continue as planned. But he did not respond to questions about the future of the Center’s other term-time programming.

The layoffs came in the latest and largest wave of the FAS’s workforce-planning efforts, which affected 13 percent of College staff as the FAS works to address its $365 million structural deficit.

Staff across the College have been impacted as existing administrative bodies are phased out and their staff and leaders let go.

The Office of Student Services does not exist under the new structure, and Dean of Student Services Michael P. Burke has been laid off. Writing Center Director Jane E. Rosenzweig has also been laid off, and volunteers with the Writing Center are being asked to transition to other tutoring programs within the College.

Further rounds of layoffs will continue in the coming weeks.

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

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