KSG Lays Off Staff Members To Trim Budget Deficit

The Kennedy School of Government will eliminate 30 administrative positions and 17 adjunct faculty positions in its latest efforts to reduce a multi-million dollar budget deficit, officials announced last week.

The staff cuts—half through direct layoffs and half through allowing vacated position to remain unfilled—affected administrative offices throughout the school.

The school, which faces a $5.6 million deficit for Fiscal Year 2002, hopes that the layoffs, combined with previous cost-cutting iniatives, will save it $2.5 million a year and put it in the black by Fiscal Year 2004.

“As difficult as the decisions were, we have tried to act as compassionately as possible,” Executive Dean J. Bonnie Newman said. “I recognize that all the compassion in the world doesn’t suffice for having your job.”

Although many of the University’s schools have tightened budgets as a result of the recession, the Kennedy School has taken the hardest hit. The school had run planned budget deficits for years to allow for growth.

But after this year’s deficit projections shot up from just under $3 million to the curent $5.6 million figure, Dean Joseph S. Nye announced in April that previous cost-cutting measures—closing the school’s Washington office, consolidating space in Cambridge and laying off five people—would not suffice.

Although Newman said the layoffs were carefully considered and had affected low-level, mid-level and senior positions, some have charged that the school has unfairly targeted the administrative staff rather than looking for other cost-saving measures.

One staff member, who spoke on condition of anonymity and said she had not been laid off, said that Kennedy School faculty “live like little kings” and that activities like faculty lunches, which occur several times a week, should not continue in light of the layoffs.

“I think most of the staff are quite hurt,” she said. “The dean seems to feel [the lunches] are more important than saving people’s jobs.”

Although the lunches will continue, Newman said the food service would be less expensive and would include more brown bag lunches in place of hot meals.

Faculty have said that lunch meetings are central to the school’s academic mission—“it’s not like these are just people sort of getting fat,” Williams Professor of International Trade and Investment Robert Z. Lawrence said.

“It’s a question of what’s most important to the school,” he added. “I understand it’s very painful for people to lose their jobs, and it’s a question of where do you want to cut, and it’s not obvious if you cut people’s meals you wouldn’t have to cut people’s jobs in the canteen.”

Meetings between faculty and the dean at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire—which the staff member had questioned as too costly—will now take place in Cambridge for a savings of $50,000, Newman said.

Nye recently appointed a committee, chaired by Nancy Palmer, executive director of the Shorenstein Center, to consider how to reduce future costs without cutting personnel, while building morale at the school.

Newman said the school was working to place laid-off staff in other positions at Harvard or at Kennedy School research centers—many of which are funded through restricted donations and thus were not affected in the staff cuts.

Adjunct faculty, who numbered 45 this year, will not be laid off as their appointments are for specific term lengths, but Newman said most of those who would not be permitted to return had hoped to do so.

Ramsey Professor of Political Economy Richard J. Zeckhauser ’62 said that he thought reducing the number of adjunct faculty would have been a positive step even without a budget crisis.

“We had made many courtesy reappointments,” he said, although he added that those who had been selected to be released were not necessarily the right choices.

Although Newman said she expected that the plan would balance the school’s budget by Fiscal Year 2004, although she said that an external event like Sept. 11—which caused severe reductions in the school’s Executive Education program income—might make the goal impossible to meet.

Furthermore, she said that each unit in the school would have to adhere to the budget plan and cut costs.

Littauer Professor of Public Policy and Administration William Hogan said in April that at the Kennedy School, administrators consistently underestimate the overhead costs they need to run their programs, leading the school to grant requests that become more expensive than anticipated.

Although the school announced the staff cuts without a prior review by Harvard’s central administration, Nye will now meet with the Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, quarterly instead of annually to review the school’s situation.

The Corporation has been concerned with the school’s fiscal health and pressured Nye for change at a meeting this spring.

—David H. Gellis contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Elisabeth S. Theodore can be reached at theodore@fas.harvard.edu.