FAS Prepares For Tough Cuts

Though Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Michael D. Smith has said that the administration will not implement sweeping staff reductions, some department administrators are nevertheless concerned that their constrained budgets will make personnel restructuring inevitable.

FAS is currently in the early stages of the budgeting process that will lay the groundwork for the fiscal year ending June 2011. Despite the drastic measures taken last year to reduce a looming deficit, department administrators said they are looking to cope with further cuts in their allocated budgets.

As FAS Dean for Administration and Finance Leslie A. Kirwan ’79 has said, she believes that this coming year will be “the year of worst financial impact.”

In an interview last month, Smith said that the FAS administration has not made plans to implement “across-the-board staff cuts,” but he conceded that departments will face smaller budgets and “people may be cut because of changes.”

“Next year is going to be a very tough year, maybe the toughest,” said Government Department Chair Nancy L. Rosenblum, who was forced to reduce a full-time staff position last year to part-time.

The Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures is currently reviewing the possibility of restructuring staff assistance, according to department chair Wilt Idema. While structural changes are not uncommon in FAS departments, the move was precipitated by financial constraints to “see how the staff may be used more rationally,” Idema said.

Sociology Department Chair Robert J. Sampson said that last year’s cuts in staff hours have reduced faculty access to staff assistance, even as concentrator numbers have doubled in the last four years.

Next year, Sampson added, might not be any easier: “It’s fair to say that across FAS, everything is being looked at pretty hard,” he said.

Bill Jaeger, director of Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers, said that University units must coordinate with the union, as per the organization’s contract, if they are planning for any reductions in staff positions or hours.

But thus far, Jaeger said he has not heard from FAS departments about such plans for restructuring.

“I’ve been taking that to mean that things are a good bit more solid than last year,” Jaeger said.

Kirwan said that FAS will use some of its financial reserves to cushion the persistent effects of last year’s economic downturn. In June 2009, the University announced that FAS eliminated 77 staff positions and reduced work hours for another 15 employees, and 156 FAS staffers took the early retirement package.

Unlike last year—when all FAS departments and administrative units were urged to cut 15 percent of their budgets—the administration is not asking units to cut a standard percentage of their budget. Rather, department administrators are in the process of collaborating with the FAS budget office to identify the core priorities of the unit.

Department leaders are expecting to learn the quantity of their subventions—unrestricted funds distributed by the Dean’s office—in the coming months.

The final list of expenditures are due by May 30, according to a budgetary overview sent by Kirwan to department and center directors in February.

—Staff writer Noah S. Rayman can be reached nrayman@fas.harvard.edu.