I’ve only had the chance to read the part 1 of this 6 screen/page article, but “Hard Times at Harvard” in the August Vanity Fair magazine is pretty interesting reading. Here’s the teaser paragraph at the top:
Only a year ago, Harvard had a $36.9 billion endowment, the largest in academia. Now that endowment has imploded, and the university faces the worst financial crisis in its 373-year history. Could the same lethal mix of uncurbed expansion, colossal debt, arrogance, and mismanagement that ravaged Wall Street bring down America’s most famous university? And how much of the turmoil is the fault of former Harvard president Larry Summers, now a top economic adviser to President Obama? As students demonstrate, administrators impose Draconian cuts, and construction is halted on an over-ambitious $1.2 billion science complex, the author follows the finger-pointing.
Some of the cost cuts are silly; for example, they no longer serve free coffee and they reduced the free shuttle bus service from running every 10 minutes to every 20. Some of the other problems are pretty dramatic, like a $220 million deficit in the Arts and Sciences college, and a $1.2 billion science complex project that has been put “on hold.”
I’ve not read the Vanity Fare piece on Harvard, but cuts there have been much in the higher education news. Hundreds – yes, hundreds – of jobs at Harvard are being eliminated. Very few of them pertain directly to instruction. So, the richest university in the land is having to eliminate jobs and focus on its main missions more.
EMU’s lack of a sizable endowment (along with income from investments) is in general a problem for Eastern, but at least for the time being we’re not as vulnerable to huge drops in income as richer schools that rely on investment returns for much of their operating expenses. If you’ve spent any time in the last year at one of those more richly endowed schools, the cut backs may have caught your attention; they are surely much on the minds of faculty and staff at such schools. This market-loss driven need to cut expenditures can be thought of as a problem of the richer institutions.
That said, it’s been widely noted around campus how odd it is that most schools are laying off staff and doing so in strategically considered ways, while EMU is not strategically assessing our staffing levels in any area of the university. I’ve heard this concern discussed by colleagues in all ranks and categories of professional staff. EMU hasn’t got a huge stock portfolio that’s taken hits this last 10 months, but god knows we’ve got huge problems on the income side and an institutional budget that has been created, over decades, with virtually no sensible assessment of institutional priorities and no comprehensive long term planning, so our fiscal concerns are as real, but quite different, than those of the rich schools. Fortunately, reform at EMU has begun, but it has not yet proceeded far.