Academic Mergers Should Serve Academics

Amid nationwide declining enrollment and funding shortfalls, the specter of one proposal continues to haunt the humanities: the merger.

Institutions such as the University of Chicago and Vanderbilt University have consolidated departments and majors to preserve disciplinary breadth while reducing overhead.

The specter has reached Harvard. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences was first reported to face a $365 million budget deficit in November, leading to a host of cuts over the past year. In March, the FAS planned a 25 percent slash in non-tenure-track faculty funding. Administrative staff were set to be cut as well, leading to Ethnicity, Migration, and Rights losing two of its three core staff members, while Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies lost all of its non-faculty staff.

And in June, the Task Force on Workforce Planning announced plans to consolidate the administrative functions of FAS’s academic units into coarser groups.

Nevertheless, the FAS has preserved its academic departments — and we applaud it for doing so. Though stymied for now, the threats to humanities education seem poised to persist. Here’s how the University should think about consolidation going forward.

As long as the FAS is strapped for cash, it can proceed with merging administrative duties across its departments. The shared use of secretaries, program coordinators, and financial managers is a practical response that trims costs without compromising autonomy across research and pedagogical missions of different departments.

When it comes to consolidating departments themselves, consolidations should happen only when they serve the academic experience of students and faculty.

In other words, Harvard should pursue consolidation where it offers the greatest benefits. Scholarship under one roof can expand research possibilities by exposing faculty to new cross-disciplinary perspectives and opening opportunities for collaboration between formerly self-sufficient departments.

If it extends to coursework, increased engagement between academic areas can also enrich and broaden the curriculum faculty teach, giving students new intellectual avenues for exploration. Further, consolidation can give smaller departments access to the level of administrative resources of a larger department.

At the same time, distinct intellectual pursuits deserve to be respected as such — some derive significant value from the specificity of their work and merit independence.

The closest Harvard came to consolidation in pre-Trump memory was in 2023, when a committee in the Division of Arts and Humanities unsuccessfully proposed consolidating Germanic, Romance, and Slavic language studies into a Languages, Literatures, and Cultures concentration. However, this proposal would have merged concentrations, rather than departments.

Opponents of the proposal would be right to argue that each academic department at Harvard is valuable, and that consolidation risks stripping away the uniqueness each teaching unit holds. Clumping departments together only makes sense when they share an academic mission.

Unpopularity was and remains a weak reason. The mere existence of a space for specialized exploration can foster an intellectual community in which students can build individual expertise — something that may not be replicated in a blended space.

Let every merger leave Harvard richer in ideas.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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