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{shortcode-16f8ced088e32bb2d90bab8d4861646b946d7fa0}ighteen days after laying off their advisor, Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences introduced some undergraduates to an alternative: a chatbot.
“To ease the process, we are experimenting with an Unofficial Harvard ECE Advisor Chatbot, which you can access using your Harvard ChatGPT account!” an email, sent to all Electrical Engineering students on Oct. 27, read. “The chatbot can help you explore course options, check prerequisites, and understand course requirements — think of it as a 24/7 study buddy!”
In the same paragraph, Demba Ba, dean of undergraduate studies of Electrical Engineering, cautioned undergraduates that the chatbot was not a replacement for human guidance: “Under no circumstance should you substitute its advice for that of a human advisor.”
Many students and faculty agree that SEAS lost something irreplaceable after a brutal round of layoffs in early October that left the school’s staff 30 people lighter — including lecturers, advisers, and faculty coordinators whose students and colleagues will be devastated to see them leave. For some, the announcement could not have come at a worse time. On the morning of Oct. 9, SEAS staff awoke to a short, scheduled email informing them layoffs would be announced that day. An hour later, selected staff received invitations to individual Zoom meetings where they learned their positions were terminated. It was the day before Declaration Day, typically more stressful for undergraduates than their potential advisors.
“I was told to take the day and Friday off,” says Bryan Yoon, a lecturer and assistant director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, who was among those laid off.
Yoon went in to work anyway. Faced with the news that he had just lost his job, he was most concerned about students being charged a fine for declaring their concentrations late.
“I had to see students to help them declare. Nobody else is going to declare them,” he says.
Benjamin Y. Brown, who manages the instructional electronics shop in SEAS and worked closely with Yoon, finds it difficult to understand the school’s logic for eliminating staff who play critical roles in supporting students’ learning and development.
“Harvard, even before any of these budget problems, has done kind of a poor job of retaining really talented lecturers,” he says. “If they couldn’t see the impact, then they weren’t paying attention,” Brown continues. “The impact was evident — very evident — on how important those positions were to their respective concentrations.”
But Harvard’s administration says the cuts were necessary as a sharp rise in the endowment tax and precarious future for federal funding buffet the school’s bottom line — and expose long-building financial fragilities at SEAS and other schools.
SEAS Dean David C. Parkes addressed staff and faculty on Oct. 9, in an email obtained by The Crimson, titled “Difficult News.” The email outlined other cost-cutting measures — such as reducing the footprint of leased space — that the school took before initiating layoffs.
“I have been working with input from across the School to develop a plan to reduce budgets and grow financial capacity,” Parkes wrote in the email. “Though we have already made a number of changes, we cannot bridge the budgetary gap without reducing our workforce.”
{shortcode-21cc3534b02e5a90dd1b6e61be0fe28423896a7e}t the end of a corridor in Pierce Hall, Bryan Yoon’s brown door stands between two union posters. “We can’t eat prestige,” one reads in bold blue letters, the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers union logo prominent below. Another, pinned to the bulletin board beside his door, declares: “Harvard works because we do.” In this tidy room at the end of the hall, the cost of prestige feels heavier than ever.
When we sit down to discuss his layoff, Yoon is matter-of-fact about why he thinks he’s been chosen. “I always knew that, being a smaller concentration, if any of the ADUSes get impacted, it will be me first,” he says. Environmental Science and Engineering, his concentration, has just a fraction of the numbers of other SEAS departments. The math, from an administrative perspective, was brutally simple. “But I didn’t expect ADUSes to be impacted,” he says, “because we are so core to the undergrad education and the mission of the school.”
For Yoon, the position of assistant director of undergraduate studies is the perfect job. “You want an amazing professor to be caring, advising, knowledgeable — that is really difficult to do,” he explains. “But this job allows you to do it.”
Most tenure-track faculty at research universities are evaluated primarily on their research output, not their teaching or advising. Harvard had the foresight, Yoon believes, to create positions where someone with deep technical knowledge could focus entirely on students.
During the pandemic, Yoon worked with Bryan to develop HazeL, a less than $200 air quality sensor named after Brown’s cat. Brown had started developing HazeL before Yoon began teaching ESE, but he quickly became integral to the improvement of the tool and its pedagogical applications.
What started as a Covid-era replacement for $4,000 instruments became something more: students enrolled in the introduction to environmental science and engineering course that Yoon co-teaches have used their HazeLs to measure air quality on different MBTA lines, in their dorms, and even at home during Thanksgiving break.
The use of HazeL as part of the courses’ open-ended final project was also an idea from Yoon. He also suggested that students assemble HazeL themselves in the course to develop a sense of familiarity and ownership of the instrument.
Every year, Yoon met with Brown and created a wish list of improvements. “He was always asking, how can we make this better? How can we improve this?” Brown recalls. “He was not willing to just accept that it couldn’t be improved.”
That same relentless attention extended to each student in his concentration. Yoon met with his 38 concentrators at least twice per semester, usually for 30 to 40 minutes, sometimes an hour. The conversations extended across all aspects of the undergraduate experience: course selection, research opportunities, internship searches, graduate school decisions, and how to choose between multiple job offers. It was the kind of holistic knowledge that took years to build and will not be easily replaced.
“No one is willing to dedicate 60 hours a week to care about the individual concentrators in this concentration,” Yoon says. “Faculty cannot do it. Even if the faculty want to devote a certain time to meet with the students, they don’t have the time to understand what’s going on beyond their own classes or beyond their lab.”
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The news of the layoffs came in a scheduled message from Parkes, the dean, at 7 a.m. Around 7:40 or 8 a.m. that same day, Yoon received another email from his manager requesting a meeting — he took it as another bad sign. He’d been setting up equipment for his course when he had to step away for the Zoom call. Senior Director for Undergraduate Education Patrick D. Ulrich delivered the news.
At SEAS, “everyone’s overqualified for the job they have,” Brown says.
“You could be making a lot of money, a lot more money than Harvard pays for a similar position, and most of us are willingly taking less money because we love what we do, and we love working with students,” Brown adds. He pauses.“It just sucks that that is not valued more.”
As the interview wound to a close, Yoon takes a moment to ask one of our reporters what they were concentrating in and instinctively offers a few bits of advising wisdom in our parting moments. Outside his door, the bolded blue words “we can’t eat prestige” echo loudly through the newly quiet hallway.
{shortcode-dd08abb0bb2b02bf4881baaa9fb305566107f8d4}ucked in the corner of the Capital One Cafe, Chris J. Lombardo, ADUS in Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, slumps over his laptop and patiently drinks from his oversized water bottle. The image is a contrast to the photos of him on Harvard’s Engineering Without Borders website, where he sports a distinctive red baseball cap and stands in smiling groups of students and locals at their project sites.
“I started at SEAS just before the 2012-2013 school year. So in August, that’s been 13 years? You can check my math,” he says.
Officially, Lombardo served as the ADUS in Electrical Engineering, but in practice, his reach extended far beyond that title. He was deeply involved in the Mindich Program in Engaged Scholarship and the committee that launched and oversaw the civic engagement certificate. Engineering Without Borders president Ayande P. Joseph ’26, who frequently turned to Lombardo for advising, says “he is someone that I go to as a mechanical engineer, even though he does not specialize in my realm of engineering. It just shows the breadth that he had and the talent that he truly brought to Harvard University, and that will be very missed.”
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As faculty advisor for Engineers Without Borders, Lombardo drew from considerable previous experience — he served as President of the EWB national board of directors in 2022 and shaped Harvard’s chapter from a “struggling student group to a group that’s been recognized twice as a premier student chapter.”
Under his guidance, the organization completed two successful initiatives in the Dominican Republic and one in Tanzania, with a fourth underway in Kenya. To ensure the work would continue beyond any single cohort of students, Lombardo created something more permanent: a credit-bearing course called Humanitarian Design Projects. The two-semester sequence, first offered in Spring 2016, has run every semester since.
For Lombardo, making the course credit-bearing wasn’t about recognition — it was about accountability and emphasizing the genuine human stakes of the projects. “The projects directly impact people’s lives in water supply, education, energy, etc.,” he says. “So if a volunteer student club doesn’t deliver these projects, that’s a tangible impact.”
The course also provided “students an excellent pre-professional opportunity to teach them skills for the workplace that you genuinely don't find in a lot of Harvard courses.”
But for all his years of service to Harvard’s engineers, the end came both quietly and suddenly. Lombardo is shocked at the decision and concerned by its implications.
“In my opinion, the first priority of the University is its teaching mission. Secondly, but also very close behind, is its research mission,” he says. “But it does not appear — in the way the layoffs occurred — that there were priorities that aligned with the mission of the University.”
When we ask what he will miss most about his job, Lombardo doesn’t hesitate: “The students.”
“There’s many students who I get to know well over three or four years as advisees, mentees, and students in my class,” he says. “It’s a much deeper relationship than just solely being an academic advisor or a one-off course instructor.”
Katherine T. Cagen ’14, a student of Lombardo’s who has remained in close touch with him over 11 years, emphasises the importance of advising for undergraduate students in an email to The Crimson. For Cagen, Lombardo remains an important adviser post-graduation and is someone she consults about major job changes or professional opportunities.
“I don’t understand how SEAS could possibly be better for losing one of the best advocates for student advising they had, regardless of the reasoning behind the layoffs,” she writes.
Even now, uncertain about his professional future, Lombardo’s focus remains on the students and communities he serves. He plans to continue supporting EWB in a volunteer capacity, ensuring the ongoing project in Kenya will not be abandoned.
“I just hope Harvard, broadly, in whatever capacity, continues to support these efforts,” he says. “We want students to have these experiences because they’re going to be the leaders of tomorrow.”
{shortcode-471488a28f98f055581c84571bdaf7c7378242a3}itting in front of a blackboard in a brightly lit office in Pierce Hall, Megan E. Reardon recounts the day she found out she had been laid off. She is one of 11 faculty coordinators affected by the layoffs, and works with Electrical Engineering Professor Marko Lončar. Lončar is a familiar face within Harvard’s electrical engineering department, having worked for the University for 19 years. He served as department chair for three years between 2021 and 2024. He has lent us his office for the interview — a copy of “Optical Physics for Babies” and a few “Nature” magazines rest on his desk.
“I slept like crap the night before, just happenstance,” she says. Not being a morning person to begin with, Reardon says, for her the day was already off to a terrible start. She attended a meeting later that day, where the coordinators were informed that 11 from their team of 35 would be laid off. No names were mentioned, but per the HUTCW union contract, layoffs would occur based on a “last in, first out” policy: meaning the newest employees would be the first to see the door.
As employee number 10, Reardon’s odds depended on whether any of her seniors accepted SEAS’s call for volunteers to opt for early retirement or voluntary retrenchment.
Two Thursdays later, another 8 a.m. email from HR would seal her fate. As Reardon expected, no one took the voluntary layoff, because SEAS “did not do anything to sweeten the pot” for departing employees.
Before her layoff, she played an essential role in managing Lončar’s labs, which are staffed by a small army of about 30 graduate and postdoctorate students and span approximately 5,000 square feet of lab space. She handles everything from paperwork to onboarding new research assistants and booking flights for lab-related travel. The role demands attention to detail and the ability to multitask, to ensure nothing falls through the cracks. It’s an underappreciated role: a behind-the-scenes administrative position that ensures faculty like Lončar can carry out their revolutionary research.
“I am the person who will absolutely make sure that you didn’t forget to dot that ‘i’, cross that ‘t’, or forget that paperwork. I will keep your stuff in order so that you can do the important work. I love doing that,” Reardon says. For the first time during our interview, we see her light up with a smile.
Reardon, before the layoffs, had planned on working with Lončar until he retired. “She’s excellent, probably one of the best administrators I’ve had,” Lončcar says, noting that he’s been through several assistants, and not everyone is fully cut out for the job. “A big experimental group in particular is a lot of work.”
“Meg, I think, really had everything it takes to kind of help us strive,” he says.
Beyond keeping the ship in order, Lončar says, Reardon’s role requires a level of “emotional and social intelligence” which allows coordinators to build trust and strong relationships with the faculty and graduate students they serve.
Over the summer, as the Trump administration’s war against Harvard set its sights on international students, Reardon feared for the graduate students in her labs who were traveling in Europe. She was only able to advise them to travel in groups and be mindful of their visa paperwork.
“I looked at my husband and I was like, ‘I didn’t want children, and now I have grad students,’” she says. In her work, she had found, in many ways, a “little family.”
For Lončar, another painful element of the layoffs was that faculty like himself were left out of discussions about how the changes would impact the rest of the team. Lončar believes an alternative funding plan could have kept more employees on the payroll: unrestricted research grants could have been applied to supplement administrative and research salaries.
Under SEAS’ plan, the remaining coordinators will be responsible for handling five labs each, instead of their original three. Coordinators are also being asked to work physically from the office for three days of the week instead of two, according to Matthew G. Zahnzinger, a union representative for HUCTW. Zahnzinger has been a faculty coordinator at SEAS for more than eight years, and is one of the key players advocating for his laid-off colleagues.
“We are going to have to be in a position to provide less curated support,” Zahnzinger says matter-of-factly. “It is going to become much more transactional. Based on what we’ve been told, it feels like we’re moving towards a secretarial pool style of work, which is not the job any of us wanted.”
At an all-hands staff meeting earlier this year in May, Zahnzinger says, SEAS administrators presented their cost-cutting plans to weather the storm. He vividly recalls Dean Parkes saying that staff would be protected.
The lack of disclosure was deliberate, Zahnzinger says he was told in a recent meeting with Parkes and Tim Bowman, the dean for administration and finance of SEAS. The exclusion of union representatives from layoff deliberations has felt to Zahnzinger, “like a very top down process that did not keep the majority of the community in the loop.”
“We interact with the postdocs, with the grad students, with the undergrad students. We are the nexus point at which all departments end up,” Zahnzinger shares.
The faculty coordinators are a close-knit group, and many form personal relationships with their colleagues outside of work. As a result, even for those safe from layoffs, the cuts feel personal. As we interview Zahnzinger, a senior faculty coordinator stops by. Both exhausted, they exchange a warm hug.
Zahnzinger recalls a conversation with Reardon where they agreed that “getting a job at Harvard can feel like getting a second home.”
“You’re in a place with like-minded people who all want to be part of something bigger than they would be if they were out at some faceless corporate job,” Zahnzinger says. “That’s the kind of people who want to be here, and that’s the kind of person who Meg is,” he says.
{shortcode-21cc3534b02e5a90dd1b6e61be0fe28423896a7e}lthough the administration may have decided to let dozens of staff go, colleagues and students at SEAS don’t intend to let the layoffs move forward without a fight. In response to the news of Yoon’s departure, 41 students and alumni of the ESE concentration wrote and signed a letter addressed to Dean Parkes, urging him to reverse the decision. Lombardo’s students and alumni are now drafting one of their own. Lončar remains determined to keep Reardon, refusing to work with a replacement coordinator.
But their heartfelt objections may do little to slow the implacable march of cost-cutting.
Weeks after the SEAS layoffs were announced, the FAS announced it is facing a $365 million structural deficit. Harvard has cut back significantly on Ph.D. admissions, gutted its research funds, and rolled out a series of layoffs. Four days ago, Harvard proposed a yearlong wage freeze for its custodians.. Despite the students and faculty fighting back, Harvard has already signaled a shift towards cheaper, and what it considers more efficient, solutions.
Among those most impacted by this shift are the students who will be losing programming outside of the classroom. Staff like Yoon organized excursions for their undergraduates and alumni alike, bringing concentrators to the picturesque Squam Lake in New Hampshire because, as Yoon puts it, “how do you study the environment without going to the environment?” Yoon perks up when recalling the annual two-night retreat, and spending time with undergrads over meals and kayaking.
When asked if he believed the treasured tradition would continue following his layoff, Yoon paused to take a long sip from his mug before answering. “No, not at all, because no one — none of the faculty or staff — is willing to take their weekend and take 40 kids to New Hampshire on their own, make sure that they’re fed, that they’re entertained, and they’re safe and the funding is not gonna be there.”
Another simple question: what comes next?
“I think there’s no more to do at SEAS,” Yoon says. “I don’t think they can get rid of more. I hope not.”
—Staff writer Thamini Vijeyasingam can be reached at thamini.vijeyasingam@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @vijeyasingam.
