Retirements in the Faculty Ranks
The 180 senior faculty members University-wide who were offered retirement incentives last December had to indicate their intentions as of June 30. About 70 percent of those eligible are from the large Faculty of Arts and Sciences, whose ranks are weighted toward senior, full professors. Data on their response will not become available until a reconsideration period expires in late summer. Depending on their decisions, and any appointments to fill openings, the faculties could be reconfigured significantly, with possibly large financial consequences. For context, see “The New Tenure Track,” page 48, and look for news updates at harvardmagazine.com.
Due the Union
The Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers and the University agreed on a new two-year contract, effective July 1, that delivers $1,000 pay increases to full-time covered staff members this fiscal year (and pro-rated increases to part-term workers), and approximately 3.5 percent increases in fiscal year 2011. Under the prior contract, they realized increases averaging 4.9 percent in the year ended this past June 30. Nonunion staff and faculty members had compensation frozen during the past fiscal year, and will see pay increases averaging 2 percent in the current one.
Help from the Hospitals
Harvard Medical School’s (HMS) affiliated hospitals have agreed to provide $36 million of financial support during the next three years—welcome relief for an institution that has of late relied on income from the now-shrunken endowment for nearly 30 percent of its operating revenue.
HMS does not own its teaching hospitals. That can be a mixed blessing: Duke has regularly received significant funds from its hospital system, for instance, but the University of Pennsylvania as a whole was financially threatened when its hospital suffered enormous losses several years ago. The medical school and its affiliates have a complicated relationship, with Harvard offering clinical teaching appointments to hospital staff members; shared and sometimes competing streams of research funding; and other interactions.
Several years ago, when a number of the hospitals were under financial pressure, Harvard advanced payments from endowed professorships to support their teaching mission. Now, the flow of funds is reversed, with Massachusetts General Hospital pledging to pay HMS $11 million and its sister hospital, Brigham and Women’s, another $9 million.
