Faculty soured on Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra amid broad-scale austerity measures this year, according to The Crimson’s annual FAS survey.

Thirty-one percent of respondents said they were either “somewhat satisfied” or “very satisfied” with Hoekstra’s tenure as FAS dean, a sharp reversal from last year, when 57 percent said they were satisfied with her leadership. That figure marks the lowest approval rating she has had on the survey since stepping into the role.

Satisfaction with Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 also saw a notable dip, falling from 74 percent at the acme of Harvard’s battle with the White House to roughly 56 percent this spring.

Hoekstra drew the highest dissatisfaction of the three senior administrators measured in the survey: 43 percent said they were “very” or “somewhat” dissatisfied with her tenure, compared with 35 percent who said the same of Harvard Provost John F. Manning ’82 and 26 percent of Garber.

Frustration with the University’s governing boards remained high, consistent with previous years: A majority of respondents this year said they were dissatisfied with the governing bodies’ actions, and nearly 80 percent agreed that the Corporation lacked transparency in its decision-making processes.

Taken together, the results mark a retreat from the enthusiasm that followed Harvard’s rejection of the Trump administration’s demands and lawsuit against the federal government last spring.

Faculty instead registered broad discontent with several of the FAS’ most significant cost-cutting measures. More than three-quarters of respondents said they were “dissatisfied” or “very dissatisfied” with the FAS’ decisions to roughly halve Ph.D. admissions across the next two cycles and cut non-tenure-track faculty budgets by 25 percent across divisions. A majority also disapproved of an effort to centralize staff positions as the school moved to close an estimated $365 million structural deficit.

An FAS spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

The Crimson distributed this year’s FAS survey to more than 1,400 faculty members across the FAS’ three academic divisions from April 29 to May 22. Respondents included both tenure- and non-tenure-track faculty pulled from the school’s public masthead. The Crimson received a total of 463 responses to the email survey, with 292 fully complete and 171 partially complete.

This is the first in a series of articles on this year’s survey results, encompassing the respondents’ reactions to major financial decisions and views on University governance.

FAS Cost-Cutting Measures

Threats to Harvard’s financial standing materialized soon after U.S. President Donald Trump returned to office last year. The federal government froze around $2.2 billion in multiyear grants to Harvard once it rejected a series of sweeping demands, and a slew of internal cost-cutting measures — including a hiring freeze and pause on merit-based wage increases for faculty and non-union staff — quickly followed.

But the most consequential measures for the FAS came in the fall, after Congress passed a hike to Harvard’s endowment tax into law and the school faced a $365 million structural deficit. The FAS announced steep cuts to Ph.D. admissions, slashed non-tenure-track budgets by 25 percent, and began moving forward with an ambitious staff restructuring.

All three measures drew significant disapproval in this year’s survey, though faculty appeared most concerned about the graduate admissions cuts. Twenty-four percent of respondents said they were “somewhat dissatisfied” and 57 percent “very dissatisfied” with the decision to cut Ph.D. admission slots by roughly half across divisions for the 2025-26 and 2026-27 admissions cycles. The FAS has since said Ph.D. admissions will increase after the steep cuts.

The results echo earlier faculty pushback that, alongside renewed federal funding, prompted Hoekstra in November to walk back the planned 75 percent cut in Science Ph.D. admissions to roughly 50 percent. Science faculty had warned that the deeper reductions would inflict lasting damage on academic programs.

“Cutting the graduate programs so severely and abruptly will do permanent damage to our institution,” 100 faculty members wrote in an October letter to Hoekstra and then-Dean of Science Jeff W. Lichtman.

That 75 percent proposal came only after Lichtman pushed back on an earlier plan from Hoekstra to eliminate graduate admissions in the division entirely. Months after the dispute, Hoekstra fired him as divisional dean.

Faculty also broadly disapproved of the move to cut non-tenure-track faculty budgets, with 22 percent “somewhat dissatisfied” and 53 percent “very dissatisfied” with the decision. The policy has hit small committees and programs, including Ethnicity, Migration, Rights and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, especially hard.

Non-tenure-track faculty were least satisfied with the decision. Ninety-two percent of non-ladder respondents expressed dissatisfaction with the cuts, compared to 62 percent of ladder faculty respondents.

Among respondents who said they were satisfied with Hoekstra’s tenure, roughly 70 percent expressed some dissatisfaction with the Ph.D. admission cuts and 55 percent opposed the cuts to non-tenure-track faculty budgets.

FAS units were also affected by a staff consolidation plan —developed by an FAS committee and affiliated design teams that sought advice from McKinsey & Company consultants — meant to centralize administrative functions and cut labor costs.

Fifty-four percent of faculty said they were “somewhat dissatisfied” or “very dissatisfied” with the Task Force on Workforce Planning’s efforts to centralize staff positions this spring. Since then, the FAS has eliminated 165 positions — roughly 10 percent of the roles included in the units included in the restructuring — and moved another 24 percent of staff into new or restructured roles.

Faculty will have to contend with those changes as they return to campus this fall. Molecular and Cellular Biology professor Sean Eddy, one of the two faculty members who served on the task force, said that some of the individual staff changes were painful to witness, though he believed staffing changes were necessary.

“I’m not privy to the individual person by person decisions, and so as those person by person decisions are happening, some of them are people who I know really well,” he said.

The departure of Russ Porter, one of three administrative deans laid off this spring, “was a heartbreaking one,” he added.

Governance

As satisfaction with Hoekstra and Garber fell, faculty dissatisfaction with Harvard’s governing bodies — and their clamor for a greater say in University governance — remained relatively consistent with last year, with small upticks.

Fifty-four percent of respondents said they were “somewhat dissatisfied” or “very dissatisfied” with the actions of Harvard’s governing bodies, up slightly from 47 percent last year. 51 percent expressed dissatisfaction with the structure of Harvard’s governing bodies, compared to 50 percent last year, and 78 percent agreed that the Corporation — the University’s highest governing body — lacks transparency in its decision-making processes.

Eighty-one percent of respondents said faculty should have more decision-making power in University governance, in line with a broad-scale push that began after Harvard’s 2023 leadership crisis. Eighty-six percent said national politicians have too much influence on the University’s actions, and nearly 80 percent agreed that donors have too much influence on Harvard’s decision-making.

How faculty should exercise that influence may be a different question. Fifty-five percent of respondents said they were “somewhat satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the effort to create a faculty senate.

The result comes after the planning body released draft bylaws envisioning a primarily advisory — rather than legislative — senate. The proposal did not include a Corporation seat, an idea planning body members had considered earlier. Roughly three-quarters of respondents agreed in this year’s survey that faculty should have a seat on the Corporation. Months later, planning body members pushed the timeline further to accommodate negotiations with central administrators over the senate’s role.

University professor Danielle Allen, who has helped lead the efforts, told The Crimson in March that the group had always aimed to create “a strong partnership between the faculty and university leadership.”

“We realized that the draft that we shared with the campus at the beginning of fall didn’t actually communicate that effectively,” she added.

Methodology

The Crimson conducted its faculty survey via Qualtrics this year, leaving the survey open from April 29 to May 22.

Reporters emailed the link to 1,472 faculty on the FAS’ public masthead, adding faculty from some departments and programs who appeared to be erroneously excluded from the website. The masthead includes some faculty affiliates with appointments at other Harvard schools. All respondents were required to log in through HarvardKey to access the survey.

The Crimson generally compares the demographics of surveyed faculty against publicly available data on FAS tenured and tenure-track faculty from the corresponding academic year. This year, the FAS did not release a report on faculty demographics, nor was the full data presented during a December faculty meeting on hiring trends — a decision Hoekstra said was based on guidance from Harvard’s Office of the General Counsel.

The school also removed faculty demographic data from its website last year and renamed its Office of Faculty Development and Diversity, which previously displayed such data, to the Office of the Senior Vice Provost for Faculty.

To check for response bias, The Crimson instead compared its data against FAS demographics data for the 2024-25 academic year. Roughly 52 percent of respondents to The Crimson’s survey were tenured or tenure-track faculty, slightly lower than the about 57 percent of faculty marked as tenured or tenure-track in the FAS Dean’s 2024 Annual Report.

Of tenured and tenure-track faculty, 24.8 percent were in the Division of Science, 36.5 percent in the Division of Social Science, 34.8 percent in the Division of Arts and Humanities, and 3.9 percent in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Arts and Humanities faculty were overrepresented and SEAS faculty underrepresented in The Crimson’s survey. Data on tenure and tenure-track faculty from Harvard’s Faculty Development and Diversity Office for the 2023-24 academic year listed 26.4 percent of faculty in the Arts and Humanities division and 13.2 percent in SEAS. 32.5 percent belonged to Social Science and 27.9 percent to Science.

The Crimson does not have access to data on the distribution of non-ladder faculty across divisions.

Among respondents, 42.5 percent identified respondents were women and 53.9 percent as men, compared with 39 percent of faculty identifying as women in the 2024 Dean’s Report.

Another 23.6 percent of respondents identified as non-white, compared with 28.8 percent of faculty who are not white per the Dean’s Report. Twelve percent of respondents to the question declined to identify their race.

The Crimson did not weight survey responses to account for selection bias.

—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.