More Than 30% of FAS Social Sciences Staff Laid Off in Largest Wave Yet

Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences directly laid off 75 staff across its social sciences units last week — nearly one-third of employees covered by the restructuring and more than twice the number cut in last month’s Harvard College wave — according to a document obtained by The Crimson.

Around 15 employees were offered either a new or changed role or the option to take a layoff, while three others accepted new roles or resigned before notification and were not considered part of the action. In total, the disclosures cover 243 positions across the Division of Social Science and the affiliated Institute for Quantitative Social Science.

The cuts make the social sciences the hardest-hit part of the FAS restructuring disclosed so far. The 75 direct layoffs amount to more than 30 percent of in-scope social science staff, compared with roughly 12 percent of in-scope College staff directly laid off in the previous major wave.

The Crimson’s estimates come from disclosures mandated under the Older Workers Benefit Protection Act, which requires Harvard to provide lists of impacted and non-impacted positions to some affected employees. The documents reflect changes to employees’ existing positions, rather than their ultimate employment status, and some workers may move into or be hired for new roles at Harvard.

FAS spokesperson James M. Chisholm wrote in a statement that “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.”

The cuts were spread broadly across the Division of Social Science. Of 216 in-scope positions, 65 were directly laid off and eight employees were offered a new or changed role or the option to take a layoff.

Coordinator, faculty assistant, and financial associate positions were heavily impacted: Seven of nine positions with administrative coordinator titles were eliminated, alongside eight of 20 “coordinator,” “coordinator I,” and “coordinator II” roles. Twenty-two out of 30 faculty assistant, faculty coordinator, or faculty support specialist roles were slashed, and five of 14 financial associate and senior financial associate positions. Because the document provides job titles but no department- or center-level affiliations, it is unclear how the reductions were distributed among individual academic units.

IQSS was hit substantially harder. Seventeen of its 27 in-scope positions — nearly two-thirds — were affected: 10 employees were directly laid off and another seven were offered new or changed roles or the option to take a layoff.

The FAS is now several weeks into the broadest phase of a staff restructuring aimed at closing an estimated $365 million structural budget deficit. The school is moving toward a “federated” model that consolidates some functions like human resources and finance reporting across the FAS while grouping staff to support multiple academic units rather than individual departments.

Last week’s cuts mark the fifth broad round of job changes since mid-July — following three smaller rounds of leadership changes in May and June — and by far the largest.

The first came July 14, when seven lead administrators across the FAS’s three academic divisions were directly laid off and another seven were offered a new position or the option to take a layoff. A much larger College round followed later that month, affecting 64 positions.

Two smaller rounds followed. One employee in Faculty Affairs was directly laid off and three others were offered another role or a layoff, according to a July 28 disclosure. A July 30 disclosure covering FAS Communications and Central General Administration shows five direct layoffs and another three employees offered another role or the option to take a layoff.

Two employees in the Office of Physical Resources and Planning were also directly laid off last week, though the rest of the 81 positions covered by that disclosure were left untouched.

Taken together, the disclosures cover roughly 740 positions and show 190 positions affected since the restructuring began in May.

The scale and pace of the restructuring have also exposed errors in Harvard’s own disclosures.

While reporting on the College layoffs last month, The Crimson raised several apparent clerical inconsistencies in the disclosure with FAS officials. A revised disclosure, dated July 27, was later distributed to at least some employees with changes to several entries.

The initial disclosures indicated that 36 employees were directly laid off and at least 28 were offered a choice between a changed role and layoff. The revised document instead lists 31 direct layoffs and 33 employees offered another position or the option to take a layoff.

One employee who was initially marked as having been offered the choice between a position with no salary reduction and a layoff was listed in the revised disclosure as having instead been offered a lower-paid position or the option to take a layoff. Several other entries also shifted classifications between the two versions, even as the overall number remained roughly the same.

Major rounds of restructuring in the Division of Science and Division of Arts and Humanities have yet to take place. Several units, including Harvard Athletics, Admissions and Financial Aid, the Division of Continuing Education, Harvard University Information Technology, libraries, museums, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, were out of scope for the initial workforce-planning review, according to an FAQ posted to an FAS website on the restructuring.

That does not mean those units will be entirely insulated from the restructuring. For instance, HUIT is absorbing some IT support previously provided by IQSS. In a Friday email to Center for Government and International Studies affiliates, FAS Managing Director for IT Strategy and Coordination Andrew J. Juraschek wrote that IT support managed by IQSS’s Client Support Services team would transition to centralized HUIT support beginning Monday.

He added that some computer labs managed by the IQSS team would close as part of the transition, though HUIT would continue supporting one lab in CGIS.

Because Harvard employees who are laid off are generally required to receive 60 days’ notice, the transition will stretch into the fall semester. FAS Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra wrote in a July 29 announcement to affiliates that the school aimed to have the new administrative structure in place by mid-October and that some staff could be asked to continue in their existing roles during the 60-day period.

—Staff writer Wyeth Renwick contributed reporting.

—Staff writer Amann S. Mahajan can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at amannsm.38. Follow her on X @amannmahajan.