FAS Ends Layoff Notifications With 165 Positions Eliminated

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences selected 40 more employees for layoffs across two major academic divisions and several smaller offices last week, bringing a months-long staff restructuring to a close with 165 positions eliminated.

In the final round, 40 employees across the Division of Science, Division of Arts and Humanities, FAS Dean’s Office, and FAS Office of Research Administration were selected for layoffs outright, while another 73 were offered the option between a layoff and a new role.

In total, FAS eliminated 165 positions, or roughly 10 percent of the roles in the units included in the restructuring, FAS Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra and FAS Dean of Administration and Finance Warren Petrofsky announced last week. Another 24 percent of staff were moved into new or changed roles in the model.

Last week’s changes were smaller than those in recent waves. Nineteen of 144 staff in scope for the Arts and Humanities were selected for layoffs, along with 20 of 286 in the Division of Science. By comparison, 58 of 252 staff in the Division of Social Science and affiliated Institute of Quantitative Social Science — 23 percent — were laid off.

The Crimson’s unit- and division-specific breakdowns are based on disclosures released to some employees under the Older Workers Benefit Protection Act, which list outcomes for staff positions in scope for the group layoffs. Those latest disclosures cover about 1,200 positions and 149 direct layoffs, but do not encompass every position or job change under the restructuring.

Divisional staff received revised disclosures Wednesday after The Crimson asked FAS officials why its tally of earlier versions showed 167 layoffs — two more than FAS’ announced total, even though the disclosures do not include all layoffs.

The revisions lowered The Crimson’s tally to 149 direct layoffs. Most of the changes occurred in the Division of Social Science, where the revised disclosure shows 48 direct layoffs and another 32 offered new roles with the option of taking a layoff — not 65 direct layoffs and eight such options, as the earlier disclosure had listed. Twenty-three percent of staff in the division and IQSS were laid off, rather than 31 percent.

FAS spokesperson James M. Chisholm confirmed the accuracy of FAS’ final tally, adding that the disclosures were “prepared for a specific purpose” and didn’t include “the broader range of activities involved in the Workforce Planning effort.”

Hoekstra and Petrofsky’s Friday announcement marks the end of staff reductions that have been in the works for more than a year. Over months, an FAS task force and affiliated “design teams” worked to develop new staffing plans with help from McKinsey & Company consultants.

While roughly 2,300 full-time equivalents were included in an early baseline for the restructuring, FAS later refined the figure to roughly 1,700 because of staff attrition and changes to the project’s scope, according to Chisholm.

Molecular and Cellular Biology professor Sean R. Eddy, a member of the now-disbanded FAS Task Force on Workforce Planning, said the teams who developed the plans did not have a definitive sense of how many staff would be cut, though they had a “rough ballpark” of a 10 to 25 percent workforce reduction.

The final cuts landed around the bottom of that range, but hit some smaller programs substantially harder.

Evelynn M. Hammonds, interim chair of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, announced in a Monday message to affiliates that FAS had eliminated all three of the program’s non-faculty staff positions.

Last week, Ethnicity, Migration, Rights lost two of its three core staff members, its program director and finance and operations coordinator. The third, an academic programs coordinator, was offered the option between a new position and a layoff. All three staff members confirmed their job changes to The Crimson.

The cuts have created uncertainty in two programs that already stood to lose substantial programming because of non-tenure-track faculty budget cuts, though Chisholm said that EMR — in its new administrative grouping with History & Literature, Folklore & Mythology, and Medieval Studies — would now have the same administrative support available to full academic departments.

He added in a statement that the changes to EMR and WGS “are administrative in nature and do not reflect any change in the FAS’s or the respective divisions’ commitment to these academic areas, their missions, or their students.”

Even with the promise of more support for EMR, Fatimah Mateen — the laid-off finance and operations coordinator — said she needed more information on how specific tasks would be moved to new roles.

“It’s really important for us to have clarity on that — just who’s going to be taking up the work that will inevitably be dropped if there is no real deliberate and specific clarity around those plans,” she said.

The changes have also drawn concern from alumni. Juhwan Seo ’17, co-chair of the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard’s ethnic studies task force, said the program director role “has been really important to building the program.”

“The elimination of that position is devastating,” he said. “I mean, that role is the heart of EMR, I would say.”

The FAS Dean’s Office and FORA saw relatively few changes last week. One of 10 eligible staff in the dean’s office was laid off. None of FORA’s 12 in-scope staff were directly laid off, but five were offered the option between a new position and a layoff.

FAS issued layoff and job-change notifications in five large waves this summer, after a smaller series of decisions affecting three sets of high-level administrators. The first wave, affecting department administrators and center executive directors, took place in June.

A larger wave of College layoffs followed the next week, and several changes — including the dismissal of the Writing Center’s director and the end of the Dudley Community — drew fierce opposition from students and alumni. After more limited layoffs in the FAS’ central offices, two rounds of divisional layoffs this month accounted for the majority of the job changes.

In the coming weeks, staff whose positions were eliminated may apply for newly created positions at Harvard, meaning the eventual decline in FAS headcount could be lower than the number of positions eliminated.

It also remains unclear how many employees offered a choice between a new position and a layoff will ultimately choose the latter.

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