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Read post »Harvard budget cut reactions
Posted 5/12/09 by Eva Lam
As most people are already aware, the last year or so hasn’t been a great time for investments, and Harvard is by no means immune. In fact, Harvard crashed even harder than a lot of other investments, owing to a complex combination of factors: we were overinvested, we were facing a lot of collateral calls from private equity investments, and we had a good deal of cash invested in stuff like timber and squash farms. I don’t pretend to understand this stuff, but I do know it’s bad for two reasons: a lot of Harvard’s investments declined precipitously in value, and once the Harvard Management Company realized that they were going down, they were difficult to unload.
Hence, budget cuts. Michael Smith, Dean of the Faculty and Arts and Sciences, sent around an email yesterday afternoon (apparently 90 minutes before every student at Harvard University had a paper due, if popular reaction was any indicator) detailing some of the planned budget cuts. We’d already heard rumors of a few of the cuts (Quad library, hot breakfast), but the benignly named planning.fas.harvard.edu has much more detail. I’ll let you peruse it yourself – but I wanted to offer a sample of Harvard students’ reactions to the cuts.
Harvard already announced a couple of weeks ago that Hilles Library in the Quad would be closing at the end of this year, to be replaced by an undetermined form of “social space.” (For non-Harvard folks, the Quad is a group of residential houses about a fifteen-minute walk from the rest of campus.) The Crimson’s story has some great comments. Some were indignant:
“We’re exiled as it is,” said Jon T. Staff ’10, a resident of Currier House [quoted in the article]. “Taking our books away doesn’t seem right, especially at a great university where we’re supposed to be spending most of our time with books.”
Some were incredulous:
The title says it all. Social space before books? Social space??
Some were enthusiastically indignant:
I AM CONVINCED THE UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATION HAS LOST ITS MIND. WHAT’S NEXT, TURNING THE PUSEY TUNNEL INTO A SET FOR THE NEXT SEASON OF MTV’S THE REAL WORLD!
And at least one commenter (using the pseudonym “Currier ’11″) took the time to think at the margins, given the already “limited hours” that the Quad library is accessible:
Oh no, the quad library is closing? Now where will I go to check out a book between the hours of 3:00 and 4:30 on Tuesday afternoons?
Ordinarily, the answer would, of course, be Lamont Library, the Red Bull-soaked habitat of many a paper-writing undergrad. But apparently the Quadlings won’t even be able to get to Lamont. One widely circulated email from a pair of Quadlings complains about cuts in the frequency of shuttle service between the Yard and the Quad. There’s a good safety rationale here:
Already, the current shuttle schedule is less than ideal. It forces Quad residents to plan around the shuttle times. If a Quad resident finds herself in an uncomfortable situation at night, it can feel like the only option is to enjoy the company of the late night ABP crowd or simply stick it out. This becomes much more serious when the “uncomfortable situation” involves intoxication and the invitation to warm River rooms and their all too hospitable inhabitants.
Plus, given the closure of the Quad library, ending weeknight shuttle service at 1:30 AM poses an extra problem for late-night Lamont Library users:
Maybe what the administrations is trying to suggest is that if you want to study, visit friends who don’t live in the Quad, or participate in late night extracurriculars (such as The Crimson) by the river past 1:30 a.m., you should be prepared to sleep by the river as well. We’ll be sure to pack our sleeping bags when we take the 1:20 shuttle to our 2 o’clock class.
Of course, not all is lost: the shuttle to the Longwood medical campus will keep running on the same schedule.
YES!!!!!!!!!!!!! Although we’ll have to quit our extracurriculars, drop our study groups, and sleep on random couches, how kind of the administration to preserve our access to Longwood activities. Of course, this will require us to first Google the location of Longwood, and then discover the thrilling events that we’re sure occur there daily.
(Not mentioned in the email: the Longwood shuttle doesn’t go anywhere near the Quad, so they’re still going to have to find a way to get to the Yard.)
Finally, here’s something that affects even us lucky River-dwellers. Two of the big cuts are eliminating hot breakfast in all of the upperclass Houses except for weekends, and requiring professors and teaching fellows to proctor exams rather than bringing in the retirees who, as far as I can tell, have been doing this their whole lives. Hence, my friend’s excellent gchat status:
i would be more excited that there won’t be geriatric exam proctors next year if i were able to have an omelet before my test.
True, true. But what about the lady who always promises that if you get sick in the middle of an exam, you’ll be taken to University Health Services and held “incognito”?
Of course, all of this begs the very important question: well, what would we cut? In a particularly lively email list debate, someone floated the idea of cutting some dean positions at University Hall. Someone else said, “But aren’t those layoffs? Won’t the Student Labor Action Movement be upset?” Then someone else came back with the best post ever.
While I disagreed with SLAM, I think the argument might be that your average janitor offers greater bang for a buck than does your average Harvard dean. I mean, you can look at our list of deans here: http://www.college.harvard.edu/deans_office/index.html. I count four full deans, eight assistant deans, and nine associates. You could point to a website like this listing a $150,000 average salary for an associate (!) dean as evidence that firing deans closes the budget hole far more quickly than getting rid of half a dozen janitors.
But really, it seems to me that this logic goes too far. After all, all these deans clearly offer tremendous value far and beyond that of your average worker. I mean, everyone knows that the social life at Harvard is so exciting as to demand not one but two deans to direct it. And there’s no way Gen Ed would be the success it is without a “Dean of Undergraduate Education,” “Assistant Dean of the Office of Undergraduate Education,” Assistant and Associate Deans of Undergraduate Education, and a “Manager of Administration of the Office of Undergraduate Education.” I mean, can you imagine what would happen if we cut back–students might not actually be in a position to make a rational choice between the Core and Gen Ed! Or even know what Gen Ed does! And these are just the deans that the Harvard College website lists. I’m sure that there are plenty more sprinkled thought FAS, organizing discussions about coordinating efforts. I for one know that I depend on those deans a heck of a lot more than I do on any shuttle service! Because when I’m getting mugged at 3AM, nothing comforts me more than being able to point to my attacker and say, “You know those advising programs that I found really helpful freshman year? They wouldn’t have happened without an Asstant Dean, two Associate Deans, and a Project Manager of the Advising Program office all paid to pretty much do the exact same thing.”
Honestly, you just can’t make this stuff up.
I don’t think I could outdo that.
[...] Harvard budget cut reactions Harvard College Democrats While I disagreed with SLAM, I think the argument might be that your average janitor offers greater bang for a buck than does your average Harvard dean. [...]
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