This week, leaders of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) announced a final wave of layoffs as part of the division’s sweeping reorganization effort and offered the first official tally of the impact on employees. Meanwhile, faculty and staff began taking stock of how the administrative changes implemented during the past several weeks, including cuts to the Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA), the largest public service organization on campus, are already reshaping life at the University.
In a message emailed to FAS colleagues this morning, Edgerly family dean Hopi Hoekstra and FAS dean of finance and administration Warren Petrofsky said that, across the division, a total of 165 staff positions were eliminated, equivalent to approximately 10 percent of roles in the units that were included in the reorganization process. The email said that an additional 24 percent of staff moved into new or restructured roles in the new administrative model. “As part of the planned implementation, a number of newly designed roles will become available before the start of the academic year,” Hoekstra and Petrofsky wrote. “We hope that many of these opportunities will be filled by employees whose previous positions were eliminated in the transition.”
The letter also informed employees that at the start of fall semester, Hoekstra and Petrofsky will meet with department chairs, department administrative leaders, and the newly assembled teams in the division’s “core administrative functions.” These meetings, they wrote, “will provide opportunities to share information and answer questions. Just as importantly, we will listen carefully to your experiences…During the fall semester, we will also share information about how the new model is performing and when new and enhanced capabilities become available.”
That message comes on the heels of an on August 11 email to FAS employees, announcing layoffs and job modifications affecting four large areas of the division: arts and humanities, science, the Office of Research Administration, and the FAS dean’s office. Employees were to be notified about the status of their jobs on Wednesday and Thursday, and as of press time no information had yet been shared about specific jobs in those units.
Last week, the FAS laid off dozens of employees in its social science division and offered others reconfigured roles—in the deepest cuts so far. The previous week, the FAS eliminated 36 positions in the College and modified nearly 30 others, according to reporting in the Crimson. The reductions are part of a broad restructuring of the FAS, intended to address what division leaders say is a $350 million structural deficit.
Some of the changes have prompted strong pushback—particularly the decisions late last month to shutter the Dudley Community and co-op, consolidate the Harvard College Writing Center, and dismiss the center’s longtime director, Jane Rosenzweig. This week, some faculty members expressed concern over the scale of the layoffs in social sciences. Professor of government Ryan Enos said he worried about the possibility of “a de-emphasis on social science coming from the central administration.”
He said he views occasional workforce assessments as “a necessary but painful step” to get rid of inefficiencies, but added, “It doesn’t feel like there is a well-articulated vision for how some of these changes are consistent with our academic mission. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It just means it hasn’t been articulated to us.” He pointed to the changes at the Writing Center, which “have potentially major impacts on our teaching and research,” and cuts at PBHA, “particularly at a time when universities, and Harvard especially, are trying to be very aware of their mission to society.” He also pointed to the cuts to the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS), the University’s largest interdisciplinary social science research center. Last week, Enos said, a “large portion” of IQSS’s full-time employees (reportedly, two-thirds) were either laid off or offered modified roles.
“There are really good reasons to always question—even for things that are so central to what we should be doing as a university—whether we have the right staffing model,” he said. “But we should be articulating a vision for these decisions.”
FAS leaders have said, in division-wide emails and a series of town hall meetings earlier this summer with faculty and staff, that their priority in adopting a more centralized administrative model is to protect teaching and research by consolidating functions in closely aligned units that share subject matter, operational needs, or proximity on campus. An FAS spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment this week on personnel decisions in specific units but has previously stated that the division will release comprehensive data on the workforce impacts after the reorganization is complete.
Although the last layoffs and job changes were announced this week, FAS leaders have said they expect the transition to a new administrative model will not be fully in place until mid-October. In part, that’s because state labor laws require that employees be given a 60-day advance notice before mass layoffs take effect. Also, employees who are offered modified roles have a number of days to decide whether to accept, and some laid-off staff may be rehired into different positions.
Among the hardest-hit units in the College was the PBHA, a student-run nonprofit that draws 1,200 undergraduates every year to more than 50 social service programs, from volunteering in homeless shelters to afterschool programs to English-language tutoring for immigrants. The organization is housed within the Center for Public Service and Engaged Scholarship, which lost about one-third of its employees through a combination of restructuring layoffs and attrition during Harvard’s recent hiring freeze, according to Travis Lovett, the assistant dean of civic engagement and service. “As of September 1, we’ll have eight fewer full-time staff than we had a year and a half ago,” Lovett said. “But we are expecting that we will be able to hire for four of those roles.”
Even with those planned additions, the staff cuts are significant and part of a larger reshuffling of the center’s operations, which is still coming into view. Lovett said that at least five staff positions have been reconfigured, including his. Beginning next month, he will oversee the staff as associate dean, absorbing most of the duties of the center’s former faculty director, Warren professor the history of American education Julie Rueben, who stepped down in June. (The College does not plan to replace Rueben.) The PBHA will remain under the center’s umbrella, Lovett said, along with programs that help students find internships and jobs in public service and that help organize signature events such as Harvard’s Global Day of Service.
Lovett said it will likely be another few weeks before he and the staff have a full picture of how daily operations at the center and at Phillips Brooks House will be affected. “I think what’s been so gutting,” he said, “is that we’ve made so much progress over the last seven years”—the center was established in 2019, although PBHA dates back to 1904—“and the collaborations we’ve built across campus have really modeled what the future of campus engagement should look like and how we can work with each other to deliver results for students.”
He cited recent increases in University-sponsored public service internships, and to a six-week paid immersive program called SPARK, in which incoming first-year students work on a public service project at home during the summer before coming to campus. Lovett doesn’t want to lose the momentum programs like those have built. “Our charge is to hold core collaborations together and make sure that we’re protecting the core supports for students as much as we possibly can.”
Maria Dominguez Gray, the Class of 1955 executive director of PBHA, echoed those sentiments. “This work is important now more than ever—making sure students have a place where they are addressing the world’s most pressing problems,” she said, adding, “I think once we know where the real capacity strains are, we’ll be able to come together to as a community with our alumni and our colleagues at the College and figure out how to address the gaps.”
Meanwhile, the center’s more academic component, the Mindich Program in Engaged Scholarship, which offers courses that combine classroom work with community engagement, has been moved to the Office of Undergraduate Education, along with a newly established program that awards a Certificate for Civic Engagement to undergraduates who complete a required curriculum, which includes Mindich courses.
Last year, 76 students earned certificates, Lovett said, and 300 other students are currently enrolled in the certificate program. The Mindich Program overall is even larger. About 1,500 students take at least one of the 60 or so courses that the program offers every year, which span fields from literature to sociology to molecular biology. The employees at the center who had staffed the Mindich Program were among the recent layoffs.
In an email last week to faculty members who teach in the Mindich Program, dean of undergraduate education Amanda Claybaugh sought to assure them that the program would not be disrupted. The text of the note was shared with Harvard Magazine by one of the recipients. “As you may have heard, the FAS reorganization has brought about some staffing changes in the Mindich program,” she wrote. “We’re still working out the details of those changes, and we should be able to say more soon. In the meantime, though, I do want to reassure you that the Mindich courses will continue [emphasis hers]. Moreover, we will continue to provide the same modest financial support for course activities.”
In their Friday note to FAS employees, Hoekstra and Petrofsky acknowledged the turmoil and uncertainty of the last several weeks, and the tension among faculty and staff, which has risen with the rollout of layoffs and other changes. We know there will be challenges that cannot be resolved overnight,” Hoekstra and Petrofsky wrote. “Finding our footing in this new way of working will take time. We will continue to provide the information you need to access support and carry out your work, both during this transition and as we begin operating fully in the new model in mid-October.”
