FAS Lays Off 77 Staffers

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences has eliminated 77 staff positions and reduced work hours for another 15 employees as part of the recent University-wide downsizing, Dean Michael D. Smith announced Wednesday.

The cuts amount to a 2.5 percent reduction in the School's staff workforce, according to FAS spokesman Steve Bradt, who also said that no faculty were affected by the downsizing. He declined to state where the layoffs occurred, saying only that they were spread throughout FAS. But Harvard College Library, a unit of FAS, was the source of roughly 20 of those 77 layoffs, according to an announcement last week that also said the libraries had cut hours for several others employees.

Bill Jaeger, director of the Harvard Union for Clerical and Technical Workers, said that roughly 30 staff from FAS in his union had been laid off, mostly in "ones and twos" from 13 different departments and offices across FAS. Some of the eliminated jobs corresponded to services that administrators previously announced would be cut, Jaeger said. But he also noted that his tally's methodology and his definition of a "layoff" may differ from the School's, since the union's count does not include workers who volunteered to be laid off, nor those who were offered alternative jobs at the same time that their positions were eliminated.

The savings achieved by the latest staff cuts, as well as those arising from personnel attrition and the University's voluntary early retirement incentive program, are part of the $77 million of FAS budget cuts announced in May, Bradt said. But even after the recent downsizing and other service reductions, FAS, the University's largest school, still has a projected $143 million annual deficit that Smith says must be eliminated by fiscal year 2011. As a result, the School has now embarked on a process of "resizing and reshaping" its operations.

In the letter, Smith wrote that the global economic downturn forced FAS to reexamine all of its spending, including the compensation costs that make up nearly half of the School's operating budget. He said that previous cost-cutting measures such as the early retirement program, salary freezes for faculty and exempt staff, limitations on new hiring, and offers of reduced hours did not achieve the necessary budget reductions.

"This difficult step was necessary to ensure that we can continue vital programs core to our mission," Smith wrote.

Bradt said that the recent layoffs "are all that are planned," but he noted that the six ad hoc working groups tasked with guiding FAS's restructuring—in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the College, and FAS's Sciences, Social Sciences, and Arts and Humanities Divisions—would be "discussing and weighing future courses of action well into the fall."

In their letters announcing the downsizing last week, University President Drew G. Faust and Vice President for Human Resources Marilyn Hausammann wrote that 275 employees from throughout the University would be laid off in the coming days, split evenly between union and non-union staff. But Jaeger said he thought the announcement seemed somewhat premature and that even today he was not sure how administrators arrived at that precise number.

He said that based on the most recent analyses conducted by the Union, which should include almost all of the cuts at the University's various schools and campuses, roughly 130 HUCTW workers had been slated for layoffs. But 35 of those layoffs have been avoided through the use of "creative solutions" proposed by the union, he said, such as by consolidating work done by temporary or casual employees into full-time jobs, placing eliminated workers in vacancies that had been created by the early retirement program, and asking for volunteers to be laid off.

He noted that union negotiators still have "serious questions" about a handful of personnel cases and are continuing to engage with human resource officials about the cuts.

Despite the layoffs, Jaeger said he remained optimistic that all laid-off HUCTW staff would be able to find replacement jobs at the University, especially given the generous severance packages and job placement services provided for affected workers. The number of jobs posted throughout the University is sizable and growing, Jaeger said, adding that on the day the layoffs were announced last week, he counted 233 available jobs on the University's Web site. On Thursday, he said he noticed 17 new HUCTW job postings.

Although the media has scrutinized the layoffs and Harvard's financial planning in recent weeks, emphasizing that even the world's richest university is being forced to slash budgets, the staff cuts are not unprecedented. In 2004, while the endowment was growing, Harvard laid off over 200 employees, citing the need to eliminate multi-million dollar "systemic" budget deficits wrought by capital expansions and a slumping national economy.

Those workforce cuts similarly included large numbers of administrative and professional staff, unionized technical and clerical workers, and even some service and trade workers. Harvard College Library saw substantial staff reductions, and the University's central administration laid off 60 employees in an effort to cut costs and increase efficiency.

Protesters at the time also questioned the legitimacy of the University's budget-cutting justifications and pointed to the millions of dollars paid to endowment managers as evidence of Harvard's alleged corporatization. The "No Layoffs Campaign," the coalition of union activists, staff, and students that has spearheaded the recent protests of layoffs on campus, took shape during the 2004 downsizing. And some of the chants used in recent rallies are recitations of those heard five years earlier.

The faces that challenged the layoffs in 2004 have reappeared today as well. Geoff P. Carens, an HCL librarian vocally opposed to any kind of layoffs, organized rallies for the Campaign then as now, while Jaeger and other HUCTW leaders said in both instances that their focus is on negotiating with the University to find creative layoff alternatives.

—Staff writer Peter F. Zhu can be reached at pzhu@fas.harvard.edu.