Commencement is a wrap, and students are going home. But at Harvard University, temperatures are rising over an administrative restructuring plan that could result in sweeping staff layoffs this summer.
Leaders of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which proposed the plan, say they are trying to address a projected structural deficit of $365 million, largely because of the looming endowment tax hike Congress imposed last year and capital expenses, including deferred building maintenance. That’s about 20 percent of annual spending for FAS, which houses the university’s undergraduate and PhD programs.
A task force tapped McKinsey & Company to consult on a cost-cutting model that has intensified tensions on campus. While the school has long had a structural deficit, financial uncertainties at the federal level are adding urgency to act, FAS dean Hopi Hoekstra wrote in an update in March 2025.
Union members and organizers aren’t buying it. They say that Harvard is doing fine financially — it has an endowment of $56.9 billion — and that FAS managers are taking advantage of political crises to engineer cuts behind closed doors.
“It’s just a bargaining position, and they’re trying to squeeze the most work from the fewest people for the least money,” said Geoff Carens, a library reference assistant and member of the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers, which represents more than 5,000 staff.
The university has been facing intense pressure from its labor unions this year. Working graduate and PhD students in the 4,000-unit Harvard Graduate Student Union just ended their 40-day strike, but not their “fight for a fair contract,” the student union said.
Harvard Academic Workers, which represents non-tenure-track teachers and researchers, is asking its members to vote for a strike authorization amid mounting frustration after months of bargaining. Harvard custodians, meanwhile, ratified a new contract in March and won a significant wage increase.
Even Boston Mayor Michelle Wu was drawn into a union scuffle when she had to choose between going forward with plans to be the Class Day speaker at Harvard Law School or canceling so as not to cross the graduate students’ picket line. She canceled.
As these rifts deepen, President Trump vs. Harvard has faded to the background. This summer, it’s Harvard vs. Harvard — still a point for Trump’s scorecard, said Phillip Levine, an economics professor at Wellesley College who studies higher education financing. “That’s what Trump thrives on: the ability to get people riled up.”
Hannah Merchant is a curatorial assistant at the university’s Herbaria and one of about 800 unionized employees who fear their jobs could be on the line. She said Harvard appears to be weaponizing Trump’s attacks against the university and targeting its own employees. “That’s how it’s felt to me . . . ‘How can we cut costs and blame it on someone else?’ ”
It can be hard to imagine the world’s richest university facing financial stress; Harvard, with its nearly $57 billion endowment, is used to being both exceptional and the exception. “Unlike most colleges and universities, it is unaccustomed to the occasional cost-cutting effort,” said Larry Ladd, a college finance expert and former Harvard budget officer, and the ones it has experienced have been “very mild” in comparison.
Trump changed that.
Harvard could now pay an estimated $341 million annually, Levine said, a result of the tax on endowment returns rising from 1.4 to 8 percent for institutions with the most wealth per student, though other estimates are significantly lower.
The tiered tax rate, calculated by dividing a university’s endowment by its full-time enrollment, is hitting elite schools the hardest. Others, such as Yale and MIT, are bracing for impact as well.
Harvard’s budget woes also reflect inflation and spiking health care costs. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences is staring down deferred maintenance for approximately 250 buildings, some of which are hundreds of years old. Projected expenses could cost as much as $400 million per year over the next 15 years.
The money has to come from somewhere, Levine said, but it’s not as simple as drawing from Harvard’s endowment, the majority of which is restricted for specific purposes, such as student financial aid and scientific advancement.
“Choices have to be made,” Levine said. “It is certainly unfortunate when layoffs take place, but should they close the science lab? What’s the right decision to make?”
Harvard’s answer: Asking departments and centers to share administrative services for efficiency’s sake, James Chisholm, director of media relations at FAS, told the Globe. Many details still have to be worked out, including what jobs could be affected, he said; once finalized, the changes will be put in place over the summer. Three administrative deans are among the first to see their positions eliminated.
FAS has conveyed information about the structural deficit, endowment tax, and shifting federal funding landscape to faculty and staff for more than a year, he said, as well as met with union leaders.
The school has also been working on plans to streamline administrative operations during that time. In addition to the consultants, Chisholm said, a task force that included more than 80 faculty and staff concluded that the administrative structure should be updated.
Chisholm compared the current FAS structure to a Colonial-era house that’s “still gleaming despite its years.”
“Things work — and the house is an absolute gem that generations of families have called home — but the cost of maintaining and repairing the old systems is expensive," he said. “It limits what you can do inside the house.”
Although FAS has offered regular updates, members of the clerical and technical workers’ union say the school has not been fully transparent or provided enough financial justification for its plans. They question why such deep cuts to staff are needed now, when some costs, such as repairing buildings, can be spread over a period of years.
“It’s very hard to understand why there would be this urgent rush to slough off a huge portion of the staff when the expenses that we’re talking about are over time,” organizer Carrie Barbash said.
Despite the alarm, Ladd says it’s unlikely the result will be as extensive as many fear. Working with a corporate firm like McKinsey tends to cost a lot of money — at least $250,000 for the FAS consultation, the Crimson reported — and brings back few practical results, he said. It does, however, offer a way to signal to the board that the institution is taking cost-cutting concerns seriously while giving administrators “credibility when announcing specific cuts,” he added. “They can say: ‘I take responsibility, but it wasn’t actually my idea. It was the consultants.’ ”
In the meantime, the union has held rallies to protest upcoming layoffs.
Some staffers have worked at Harvard for decades. They include faculty and research assistants, grant managers, animal technicians who work in the labs, and coordinators for everything from undergraduate programs to registration, financial aid, admissions, and residential houses.
Unlike professors, they don’t enjoy the privileges of tenure or sabbatical. When Harvard mounted its public relations campaign against the Trump administration, administrative staff members weren’t the university’s public face. But they are often the unseen stewards of its mission, said Merchant, who helps attend to six botanical collections and more than 5 million specimens of algae, bryophytes, fungi, and vascular plants at the Herbaria.
After the pandemic first struck, she still went in to check sticky pest-control traps for bugs to make sure none could harm the collections. The word “curate,” she noted, literally means “to care for.”
None of that care or expertise is reflected on organizational flow charts, Barbash said.
“All of these consultants seem to have the same plan every time,” she said. “It’s all just various versions of centralizing.”
Brooke Hauser can be reached at brooke.hauser@globe.com. Follow her @brookehauser.