We are writing in response to comments made by Dean David Deming at a recent Harvard College open forum about his plans to cut administrative staff in order to save student-facing programming. To those present at the event, Dean Deming described administrative responsibilities carried out by staff as work “you would never really know or care about, frankly,” and identified so-called “back office” operations as “the first places” he would look to cut, implying that these functions are non-essential to the University’s core mission and our students’ academic pursuits.
The Dean’s characterization is not only dismissive and demeaning to the Harvard employees who carry out this work, but it represents a profound misrepresentation of the role administrative labor plays in enabling and sustaining academic and campus life. It further calls into serious question the rationale for the proposed FAS layoffs, which appear to rest solely on misleading claims rather than concrete evidence.
The work of Harvard staff is fundamental to every aspect of the student experience. Every class taught at Harvard is supported and facilitated by administrative staff. Every student admitted, every financial aid package assembled, every tuition payment processed, every course registration completed, every advising and counseling appointment scheduled, every course website created, every classroom reading licensed and distributed, every laptop repaired, every laboratory equipped, every dorm repair completed, every work-study paycheck processed, every graduate school faculty recommendation delivered on time—all of it depends on the systems and people that Dean Deming has described as expendable and invisible.
Would it be invisible to students if their tuition payments were delayed or mishandled because staffing was slashed?
Would it be invisible to researchers and students if their labs could not function because materials were not ordered, payments to vendors were not processed, or equipment was not repaired?
Would it be invisible to the University if admissions, financial aid, course enrollment, or fundraising—all of which sustain access to education—were disrupted due to large staffing cuts?
The answer is obvious. This work is only “invisible” when it is functioning. The moment it is disrupted, it becomes urgently and inconveniently visible to everyone. This has been made painfully clear at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), where support staffing has already been slashed by 25%. In a March article discussing the impact of the layoffs at SEAS, the Crimson reported that “…students say the consequences [of the SEAS layoffs] are showing up in disrupted courses, unfixed machines, and shrinking support. One PhD student noted, “My co-workers and I will end up having to spend an entire afternoon that we were going to be doing research trying to fix a laser cutter, trying to chase down all the people involved so that we can keep everything running…In the past, this was done by a paid staff member.”
It is precisely because this work is so essential—and so constant—that it is often taken for granted. But taking it for granted does not make it expendable.
Additionally, any discussion of the supposed need for cuts must begin with the fact that administrative support staff levels have already been significantly reduced. Through attrition and the prolonged hiring freeze, FAS support staffing has already declined by roughly 10% over the past year—an erosion that has increased workloads, strained operations, and tested the limits of what remaining staff can sustain. Moving forward with additional staffing cuts would significantly compound the risk to the University’s core functions, as we are already seeing at SEAS.
Against this backdrop, Dean Deming’s claims that financial pressures necessitate urgent mass layoffs are even more concerning and unsupported by evidence.
The Dean suggests that layoffs are justified because the new endowment tax “blew a hole of roughly $100 million per year in the FAS budget” and described it as a fixed, recurring cost. But the 8% endowment tax applies only to realized gains—that is, profits generated when Harvard endowment assets are sold. It is not a tax on the endowment itself, nor is it a tax on investment growth that exists only on paper (which constitutes most of the endowment growth reported each year).
That distinction is critical. Harvard has considerable latitude in determining when—and whether—those gains are realized. Through well-established financial practices, the University can delay asset sales, spread the sales over time, offset them with harvested losses in other areas, or draw more on dividends and interest in order to substantially minimize (or in some years potentially eliminate) the tax hit in a given year. These are not hypothetical strategies or rarely used emergency measures; they are standard features of how large endowments are managed.
In other words, Harvard has many options to substantially mitigate the impact of the endowment tax. Presenting it as a static, ongoing budgetary “hole” of $100 million assumes an implausible worst-case scenario in which Harvard’s highly skilled and well-paid asset managers are not doing their jobs.
When far-fetched projections are presented as settled fact—and the work that facilitates Harvard academic life is dismissed as something no one would “know or care about”—it raises serious questions about the judgment, accountability, and integrity behind University decisions. Decisions of this magnitude demand rigor, transparency, and respect for the full scope of work that makes the University function—not reductive characterizations or unsupported conjecture.
Comments like those made by Dean Deming advance a divisive “us or them” narrative—one that treats some members of our community as less valuable than others and therefore expendable. It may offer decision-makers a certain comfort to imagine that cuts fall only on staff no one would “know or care about.” But this is a false premise. Harvard’s teaching, research, and student life are inseparable from the work of the University’s support staff—they cannot function without it. The work may not always be visible, but it is always essential.
We call on Harvard and FAS administrators to halt the unwarranted rush toward large-scale layoffs and to provide the transparency, accountability, and respect owed to the University community, so that staff, faculty, and students can engage in honest discussions about Harvard’s financial future.
Thank you,
The HUCTW Executive Board & Staff
Simone Gonzalez, President
Tasha Williams, Vice President
Ben Janey, Treasurer
Danielle Boudrow, Recording Secretary
Carrie Ayers
Nyasha Bovell
Katie Genovese
Jason Gerdom
Katherine Westermann Gray
Victoria Groves-Cardillo
Sarah Hillman
Bridget Hinz
Tina Lin
Scott Peach
Cassidy Spiess
Donna Sweeney
Anna Taylor
Carrie Barbash
Alex Chisholm
Jill Comer
Lynn Wang DeLacey
Laura Ebenstein
Randi Ellingboe
Joie Gelband
Emily Spicer Hankle
Bill Jaeger
Mack McKenzie
Jaime Pepper
Rachael School
Tracey Smith
Ann Sjostedt
Emily Vides
Harvey Willson