Massive Layoffs To Hit Art Museums

The Harvard University Art Museums (HUAM) will reduce its workforce in the coming months in order to stave off a $1.5 million budget deficit, its workers were told last week.

HUAM Acting Director Marjorie B. Cohn said the uncertain economy and stagnant endowment payouts were to blame for the layoffs. Seventy percent of the art museums’ operating budget comes from endowment revenue, Cohn said.

Though museum officials said they do not yet know who will be let go, they have formed a task force—headed by Cohn and HUAM Deputy Director Richard D. Benefield—to decide where to make the cuts.

HUAM spokesperson Matthew Barone said the very creation of the task force several weeks ago likely meant such cuts would be sizeable.

“They need to get rid of the $1.5 million deficit and it’s inconceivable that it could happen without layoffs,” he said.

The job cuts in the museums are the latest in a series of staff cuts across the University that have come as it struggles to deal with the sluggish economy and, according to Office of Human Resources spokesperson Marilyn D. Touborg, zero or negative returns on endowment investment.

Just last month, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study slashed its workforce by over a quarter, letting go of 33 workers. Radcliffe officials attributed the cuts to a budget crisis and to Radcliffe’s metamorphosis from a womens’ college into a research institute. A few months earlier, a Graduate School of Education (GSE) accountant discovered $2 million of previously unknown debt, resulting in 13 job cuts. And back in February, the University reorganized its payroll office by firing the entire staff and rehiring most of its approximately two dozen employees. Three were laid off and are no longer employed at Harvard.

For the art museums, which will see rising costs without rising endowment disbursements, the budget crunch may limit programming for Harvard’s flagship Fogg, Sackler and Busch-Reisinger museums.

“The museum operations are of course bounded by things like our union contracts, by utilities costs, by benefits costs, insurance costs, all kinds of costs that have built-in rises,” said Cohn. “It’s a guarantee of a deficit for the museums operations.”

Cohn said the task force would carefully review where to make cuts.

“My concern is not simply with layoffs, my concern is restricting the range of our various projects so that a staff that has to be cut to some extent can do everything,” she said. “We’re not just reviewing the numbers that the staff costs us, but also the projects that are going that represent cash out of our budget elsewhere.”

She said the museum would probably limit exhibitions and reduce publications in order to save cash.

“We’re not going to do a worse job, we’re going to do a smaller job,” she said.

Summer of Discontent

With employees across the University worried about losing their jobs in a shaky financial market, the unions hardest hit by the layoffs—in particular the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW), with 4800 members—maintain that they are doing what they can to protect their members’ jobs.

HUCTW Director Billy Jaeger said the union has tried to provide adequate information for its members and secure new positions for displaced workers.

Most of the workers who lost jobs at GSE have found jobs elsewhere in the University, he said. Several of those laid off from the payroll department had decided to venture outside Harvard for employment.

And despite the layoffs, Jaeger said, new programs at the University have actually increased the number of jobs represented by HUCTW.

But some workers in HUCTW contend that their union has not adequately fought for the rights and security of the membership. They complain of a disconnect between the union leadership and the rank-and-file, arguing that news of impending layoffs is not as widely publicized as it should be.

Randy Fenstermacher, a HUCTW member and library employee, said union membership hadn’t been told about layoffs like the ones at Radcliffe—even though union leaders knew of financial difficulties at the Institute for months preceding the July cuts.

“There have been three layoffs and with two of them we’ve heard nothing,” Fenstermacher said. “One of them we’ve heard somewhat less than nothing,” he said in reference to the firings at Radcliffe.

“Did they know before the people were told? If they did know, did they do anything about it?”

HUCTW member and library employee Jeff W. Booth said he was worried about the recent staff cuts.

“I don’t know if it’s a pattern yet, but there are usually layoffs happening somewhere within our union and it seems to be increasing,” he said. “We hear about layoffs from time to time and we’re worried about that and angry about that and we’re trying to get our union leadership to get involved...We have the largest union on campus and potentially a lot of power and we’re completely silent.”

—Staff writer Laura L. Krug can be reached at krug@fas.harvard.edu.