Despite widespread concerns expressed by staff and managers, FAS decision-makers continue to push forward with sweeping job cuts at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. These cuts will hurt laid-off staff, overload the remaining employees, and erode and destabilize the services and support that underpin every aspect of FAS’s academic mission.

For months, FAS staff have lived with uncertainty about their jobs, their workloads, and the future of their departments. Hundreds of staff and managers have raised serious concerns about the scale, pace, and risks of the proposed changes, yet those concerns have been ignored and many pressing questions remain unanswered. In the letter below, we have provided some updates and feedback about what we know and the information shared through the recent FAS town hall presentations.

Since the restructuring was first announced, HUCTW leaders have pushed FAS administrators to stop the rush toward mass layoffs and answer questions about the proposed reorganization and rationale. We are also continuing to find ways for members to join us in fighting back and pushing for answers. Thank you to the many members who turned out to our visibility events last week and wrote a postcard to Task Force decision-makers. If you were unable to attend one of those events, you can still write a postcard to FAS leaders by June 30. Fill out your postcard here. We will deliver it to the FAS deans in person, along with hundreds of others already written by your coworkers. Non-HUCTW colleagues are welcome to take part too.

FAS Town Halls: More Questions Than Answers

Like many members, we attended the FAS town hall meetings about the restructuring plans, hosted by Deans Hopi Hoekstra and Warren Petrofsky during the week of June 8–11, hoping for more clarity. We spoke to several hundred union and non-union staff afterward, and the feedback was remarkably consistent.

Staff described the town hall presentations as frustratingly vague and out of touch. Many felt that broad assurances had been offered in place of any concrete information—with no detail about how the reorganization would function in practice, how workflows or systems are actually changing, or how remaining staff would be expected to meet existing workload demands with a dramatically smaller workforce. FAS administrators have asked staff for patience and grace throughout this process, but more than a year later, staff still have no answers to their most basic questions while their livelihoods and daily work remain subject to a secretive, stage-managed review process.

Revised Workflows Cannot Replace Hundreds of Jobs

During the FAQ section of each town hall, Dean Warren Petrofsky read and responded to a version of the question: “How can I get my work done with significantly fewer people—what work has been eliminated?“

In response, Petrofsky pointed to a list of efficiency measures that FAS leaders believe will reduce workloads: eliminating shadow systems, increasing consistency across workflows, reducing layers of approval, and introducing new tools and technologies. There were no further details beyond this list of broad efficiency concepts and jargon, and no explanation for how these types of modest changes to workflows and systems—even if implemented on a wide scale—could possibly reduce enough work to offset the elimination of 300, 200, or even 100 staff jobs.

Cutting Jobs First and Leaving Staff with the Fallout

Greatly compounding this concern, Petrofsky explained that the Task Force design teams have restructured only a handful of workflows—”two to three workflows per design team.” But the work performed by FAS staff is not organized around a handful of workflows; it consists of hundreds of workflows tied to thousands of interconnected, time-sensitive tasks on which academic life depends.

Petrofsky’s comments make clear that most of the processes and workflows employees carry out every day have not yet been redesigned. Instead, he indicated that once the new FAS organizational structure is in place, staff would then begin identifying inefficiencies, redesigning systems, and developing better ways of accomplishing the work together.

In other words, FAS is planning to cut jobs first and leave the remaining staff to figure out how to make the work manageable later. And the plans they have for reducing workloads in the future (redesigning workflows and systems) will only reduce them around the margins, not several hundred positions worth of work.

Staff will enter the academic year with far fewer coworkers and an unfamiliar new reporting structure, but largely the same volume of work and largely the same workflows. A huge number of tasks and responsibilities will be shifted onto a dramatically smaller staff, creating impossible workloads; increased errors, delays, missed deadlines; and causing important responsibilities to fall through the cracks.

The consequences will not be confined to staff—students and faculty will suffer. FAS employees provide the operational foundation for teaching, research, advising, faculty hiring, grants administration, academic programs, and student services to function. When the staff foundation is eroded, the effects will destabilize the entire FAS academic enterprise and the School’s ability to deliver on its core mission.

Rapid Response Team Is Not a Long-Term Solution

When asked how FAS would ensure that layoffs do not negatively affect the work of faculty and students, Dean Petrofsky pointed to the creation of a rapid response team, for which staff slated for layoff would be recruited as temporary responders to troubleshoot problems that arise during the first few months in “a matter of minutes or hours rather than days or weeks.”

All of the FAS employees we have spoken with since the town halls indicated that this plan struck them as detached from operational realities, given the complexity of staff responsibilities, the learning curve involved, the volume of issues likely to arise, and the scale of the proposed job cuts.

More importantly, the rapid response team is a temporary measure. Its creation does not address the fundamental question: What happens if too many positions are eliminated and the remaining staff cannot sustain the work after those initial months have passed? What is the plan then?

Staff Concerns Have Largely Been Ignored

Along with HUCTW leaders, many union and non-union staff and managers have raised urgent questions about proposed changes, but they report that it feels as if their concerns have been dismissed or ignored by FAS decision-makers.

When Dean Petrofsky answered a question at the town halls about the perceived lack of staff engagement in the restructuring process, he argued that an organization of this size cannot consult everyone directly and must instead rely on “representative participation.” Yet it appears that there were zero representatives of FAS union staff serving on the design teams, despite the fact that HUCTW members make up more than 800 of the employees whose positions fall within the scope of this reorganization and that many of the workflows and systems being discussed are at the center of their daily work.

Additionally, according to the hundreds of union members we have spoken to, most of their non-union coworkers, managers, and department administrators feel just as ignored and in the dark as union staff—even many managers who participated on the Task Force design teams.

During the town halls, we were struck by the contrast between Dean Hoekstra’s description of a deeply consultative process and what we have consistently heard over many months from FAS employees. Staff and managers at every level of FAS repeatedly describe feeling excluded from important decisions about their departments, dismissed and condescended to when they raised serious concerns about proposed plans, and left without meaningful opportunities to shape changes that will fundamentally affect the work that they know better than anyone else.

Layoffs Are Not Justified by Financial Need

We have said this many times before: the threats from the Trump administration are serious and deserve careful contingency planning. But those threats do not change a basic fact: Harvard is not facing a financial crisis. The University and FAS have experienced no significant financial losses, nor have they shown that such losses are imminent. Mass layoffs at FAS are a choice, not a necessity, and they cannot be justified.

FAS administrators’ frequently cited “$365 million projected structural deficit” is built around two long-term predictions: (1) the projected building renewal costs over the next fifteen years—a cost that is paid for by a separate capital projects budget funded by donations, not by staff salaries or through the School’s operating budget; and (2) the projected impact of the federal endowment tax—an area where Harvard retains significant ability to mitigate the financial impact—which will not begin to take effect until mid-2027.

FAS administrators have yet to provide any evidence for why staffing cuts of this scale and urgency are needed in response to these projections, or why any smaller additional reductions could not be achieved through continued gradual attrition over the next year rather than mass layoffs. HUCTW staffing levels within FAS have already been reduced by 13% over the past 1.5 years through the hiring freeze. Similar reductions have almost certainly occurred among non-union staff and managers. Those reductions have generated substantial savings, and staff and managers are already stretched thin. FAS’s academic enterprise cannot afford to lose 100–300 more positions, especially at once, and there is no evidence it needs to.

FAS’s most recent financial report, for FY2025—which, notably, was not shared with the Harvard community for the first time in decades, although we were able to obtain a copy—shows only a $7.7 million deficit (not $365 million). Moreover, FAS reported that modest deficit in FY2025 only because the fiscal year closed before Harvard’s federal funding was restored (it was restored in FY2026). If the approximately $750 million per year in federal funding had been restored before the close of FY2025, instead of after, FAS would have reported a significant budget surplus for FY2025, as was confirmed to us by FAS financial administrators. The previous four FAS financial reports (for FY2021–FY2024) show surpluses and the FY2026 report will almost certainly show a large surplus.

It Is Not Too Late to Stop the Rush Toward Layoffs

Ultimately, FAS is proposing to eliminate several hundred jobs before demonstrating that the work itself has been meaningfully reduced, before redesigning the workflows it claims will create efficiencies, before testing whether its new organizational structures function as intended, and without establishing a compelling and documented financial justification for such severe cuts.

At every turn, FAS leaders have asked staff to trust that efficiencies will materialize, that workloads will become manageable, that service levels will be maintained, and that the risks are worth taking. Yet they have provided no concrete evidence or details to support those assurances, and they have repeatedly disregarded warnings and concerns raised by the staff, managers, and department administrators who know the work best.

The stakes are far too high for guesswork and vague promises about future efficiencies. The damage from cuts on this scale will not be easily reversed. FAS will lose hundreds of skilled employees along with decades of expertise and institutional knowledge. The work will not disappear with the jobs—it will be shifted onto a dramatically smaller workforce, creating impossible workloads and increasing the risk of errors, delays, and service failures. Teaching, research, and student support will suffer, and rebuilding that lost capacity could take years.

FAS decision-makers still have time to choose a different path. Rather than rushing toward mass layoffs, FAS could maintain current staffing levels (which have already been reduced by more than 10%) and begin testing the proposed “hub-and-spoke” reporting structure and department clusters before putting several hundred staff jobs—and the FAS academic enterprise itself—at risk.

FAS must slow down, heed the warnings of those who know the work best, and recognize that protecting staff and protecting the academic mission are not competing priorities. You cannot strengthen the academic mission by weakening the workforce that makes it possible.

Please note that although we have been pressing FAS leaders for more details, we do not yet have information on individual proposed job changes or layoffs. We continue to receive questions from members about the HUCTW Work Security Program (which provides significant financial, benefits, and job search support for laid-off union staff) so we are providing the following link so that members can read more about the Program: https://huctw.org/worksecurity

Again, all HUCTW members and Harvard community friends can still fill out an electronic postcard on our website—anonymously or with their name attached—and we will deliver it, along with hundreds of others, to University Hall. Fill out your postcard by June 30.

Please let us know if you have any questions about the above, or anything else that you’d like to discuss confidentially by reaching out to your HUCTW organizer(s) or writing us at huctw.info@huctw.org.

Thank you,

HUCTW