Hiring Cut Could Hurt FAS

Aiming to reduce costs in a bleak fiscal climate, Harvard has tightened faculty hiring in recent months—a move that has raised the question of whether certain peer universities are seizing the opportunity to acquire the best young talent.

Princeton and Yale—both of which have not instituted across-the-board cuts in faculty searches—are maintaining hiring levels, well aware of the increased scrutiny of faculty hiring at schools like Harvard, where, despite six new searches announced yesterday, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has still seen its hiring slashed by half since this fall.

“Many of [our] peer institutions have decided that their strategy would be to take this as an opportunity to be aggressive and to invest in the future and in junior faculty,” said James H. Stock, chair of Harvard’s economics department. “I think that those are wise decisions.”

Stock has not been the only professor to acknowledge the prudence of meeting a slow economy with increased hiring efforts. At a meeting of the Faculty in mid-November, Xiao-Li Meng, the chair of the statistics department, was greeted with thunderous applause after standing to argue that Harvard could take advantage of the financial struggles of other universities by increasing its searches.

“The best asset about Harvard is not its endowment, but its faculty and students,” he said. “And I think this might be the best time for us to recruit.”

But in an interview last week, FAS Dean Michael D. Smith did not list faculty hiring among his top three priorities, preferring to stress a commitment to protecting and improving current academic programs.

“Obviously, there are lots of wonderful Ph.D.s graduating now that we’d love to be considering,” Smith said. “But my main concern again is to make sure that the faculty and the students and the staff that we have on campus today are well supported.”

Still, bringing in new faculty remains a top priority for some key peer institutions. While FAS has cut its searches from 50 to 21 to cut costs, Princeton and Yale have not reported slashing any hires.

The discrepancy may have consequences for the academic balance of power. Universities not cutting back on hiring will likely be able to lure more of their top choices than in years past, as the number of available spots for junior professors across the country sinks.

“We’ll probably get a bigger percentage of our offers accepted than usual because we’re usually up against Harvard, Stanford, Princeton,” said Frances M. Rosenbluth, chair of the political science department at Yale. “We’re more likely to get our top picks this year.”

A BUYER’S MARKET?

In Harvard’s economics department, which lost two of its three searches this year, the potentially disadvantaged hiring situation has raised some eyebrows.

“There are a few places that are being smart about this and are stepping up hiring,” said Paul Niehaus, an Economics Ph.D. student at Harvard, who has already done a junior faculty job interview at Yale this year.

Harvard Economics had its two junior faculty searches cut to one during the hiring slow-down, and—with FAS money tight—was forced to dip into its own departmental reserves to pay for the search.

Princeton, by contrast, is likely to hire at least five new junior professors for next year, according to Oleg Itskhoki, a Ph.D. student in Economics. That number has not been slashed at all in response to financial conditions, according to Hyun Song Shin, the assistant chair of Princeton’s economics department.

At the senior faculty level, Harvard’s economics department saw its one search put on hold, while Yale has stayed the course that it set for itself prior to the crisis with between 5 and ten searches, indicating that preserving its commitment to hiring might give it a key edge.

“Of course we hope that other schools will make mistakes and we’ll be able to take advantage,” said Christopher R. Udry, chair of Yale’s economics department. “In the case where other schools panic and overreact, we might be able to make some progress.”

ENDOWMENT MATTERS

Harvard’s decreased hiring reflects more than simple priorities. Yale and Princeton have been able to continue recruiting aggressively in part because they are less dependent on their endowment than FAS, which relies on endowment funding for over half of its budget.

The financial crisis has also hit their endowments with a softer punch: Princeton’s endowment declined 11 percent and Yale’s 13.4 percent in the same time frame that Harvard’s declined by 22 percent.

European schools, which can rely on a steady flow of income from the government and do not rely on their endowments, also are looking to take advantage of the financial crisis raging at their peer institutions across the Atlantic.

“European schools are really hiring aggressively,” said Itskhoki. “They will be able to get much better students than before.”

Harvard is not the only school that has cut back on searches.

Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences froze most of its faculty searches—about three dozen, according to Dean Richard P. Saller. Now left with only a dozen searches already “near completion,” the school will have to wait on fulfilling its plans to build faculty in departments such as East Asian Languages, Saller added.

Columbia, Cornell, and MIT have also slowed down faculty searches.

Itskhoki, the Economics Ph.D. student, said that despite the cuts Harvard might have the upper hand in the long-run, foregoing aggressive hiring now while assuming that it can poach the best young talent later.

“If Harvard thinks that it can easily in a couple of years see who’s going to be really, really good in the current cohort,” Itskhoki said, “they can easily steal those people.”

Staff writer Noah S. Rayman contributed to the reporting of this article.

—Staff Writer Bonnie J. Kavoussi can be reached at kavoussi@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff Writer Esther I. Yi can be reached at estheryi@fas.harvard.edu.