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When Harvard College’s three diversity offices shut their doors in July, their 35 undergraduate interns lost their jobs — and for weeks after the office closures, nobody told them.
Now, the Harvard Foundation — an umbrella center that replaced the three offices — is accepting only 12 undergraduate workers for this school year, according to job listings posted on the Student Employment Office website on Sept. 11. None of the former interns are guaranteed a spot.
The diversity offices’ staff were transferred to the Foundation, a new center within the Office of Culture and Community, over the summer. But undergraduate employees, who were given no advance warning about the closures, were never officially informed that they were out of a job, according to five former interns who spoke to The Crimson.
Some did not learn the news until the Foundation job listings went up — two weeks into the school year.
“There was never this unified communication from the university that we wouldn’t have our jobs when we returned back in the fall,” said Aaryan K. Rawal ’26, who worked at the Office of BGLTQ Student Life for two years. “It was on a very ad hoc basis.”
Until this year, student interns did not have to reapply for their jobs between semesters, though some were asked to email office directors to confirm that they wanted to return.
Any interns who secure Foundation positions this semester may find themselves taking an effective pay cut. Continuing interns at the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations, the Office of BGLTQ Student Life, and the Harvard College Women’s Center could expect a roughly 30- to 50-cent raise to their hourly wages with the new school year. But the Foundation will offer its student employees the same hourly wage paid to entry-level interns at the diversity offices.
Applications for the Foundation jobs closed on Sunday.
Harvard College spokesperson Jonathan Palumbo wrote in an email that the College “communicated updates on the new office to impacted staff and student employees in the days and weeks ahead of the final announcement as decisions were finalized.”
At the start of the spring semester, some interns feared that President Donald Trump’s second term would uproot the offices. But those worries began to dissipate as the semester passed without major changes.
Rawal said that in at least one conversation in the spring, QuOffice leadership assured concerned interns and other students that the Trump administration would not obstruct LGBTQ student programming on campus.
“What we saw was our directors basically not take the threat seriously,” he said. “I recall a conversation where one of them basically said the Trump administration was incompetent in their first term, and therefore we can bank on that in their second term, which is why we don’t have to act with urgency.”
When Harvard announced a hiring freeze in March, some thought the offices would not be able to make new hires — but believed they would keep their own positions.
Many student interns did not suspect their jobs were in jeopardy until July 10, when the Crimson reported that the offices’ websites had disappeared. When Olivia F. Data ’26, a communications intern at the Women’s Center, left school in the spring, she thought her fall position was “safe.” She might have to reapply, unlike in other years, but only as a formality, Data thought.
But when she tried to sign on to the center’s Instagram account on July 10, the office’s social media had vanished without warning.
“The account didn’t exist,” Data said. “The Women’s Center account just wasn’t there anymore, which seems like a really bad sign.”
In the weeks after the website removals, students remained in the dark. The process was chaotic: even the former directors of the diversity offices were not informed of the decision to close their offices and reassign employees until hours before the changes were announced in a July 23 email to College staff.
The emailed announcement, which was forwarded to student interns by Associate Dean of Students for Culture and Community Alta Mauro, did not address the status of interns’ jobs.
“As key partners with the DSO and our office, we want to share this important news with you,” Mauro wrote. “We look forward to your partnership and collaboration with our office staff as we expand the reach of our work.”
Students who sought answers over the next few weeks were met with little clarity and sometimes given conflicting information.
Several days after Mauro’s email, former intern Amber M. Simons ’26 visited the QuOffice and asked Meagan von Rohr — the QuOffice’s former director, who is now a Foundation director — about whether the interns would be guaranteed positions at the Foundation in the fall.
“Either she was just being misleading on purpose or she didn’t know, but she made it seem like she thought we were just going to be automatically rehired to the new position,” Simons said.
But former QuOffice intern Hannah L. Niederriter ’26 got a different answer when she met in late August for First-Year Retreat and Experience leadership training with von Rohr and other Foundation administrators, including Mauro, senior director Habiba Braimah, director Bonnie M. Talbert, associate director Matias Ramos, and program manager for military student services Craig Rodgers.
“Even asking them to their face, they didn’t know how many interns they were going to hire,” said Niederriter, a former Crimson Design editor. “They didn’t know if we would get priority in the application. They just couldn’t really tell us anything about even what our job would be at the new office.”
A day later, one student intern finally got a more definitive reply. Administrators — including the Foundation’s assistant director of human relations and finance, Bridget Duffy — told Rawal at an undergraduate student worker union bargaining meeting that Rawal and their coworkers would not return to their positions in the fall.
“Harvard basically said that if you’re a previous student worker, you have to reapply for these positions,” Rawal said. “While they intended to give us priority, there was no guarantee about what happened. They also had no idea how many they were hiring for.”
Palumbo, the College spokesperson, declined to comment on what students were told by Foundation staff, citing a policy against making statements about private conversations. He did not comment on when the College decided to ask students to reapply and to reduce the number of internships, writing in an email that the decisions were “part of the ongoing planning.”
Former QuOffice intern Matteo Diaz ’27 said he and his coworkers “received about just as much information as the public has.”
“I’d worked there for about a year. I know there are folks who’ve been working there longer, but we know just about as much as everyone else,” said Diaz, a Crimson Editorial editor.
To Data, the offices’ sudden closure “felt like a secret.”
“It happened over the summer when students weren’t on campus to respond,” she said. “There was no dialogue around it.”
None of the five former interns that The Crimson interviewed reapplied to work at the Foundation. Several cited the Foundation’s move away from specific programming for LGBTQ students, female students, and students of color.
“While I’d still be able to create community in the new office, my services would not be dedicated to queer students, which is something I thought was very important about my role at the QuOffice,” Niederriter said.
Simons said the QuOffice’s “messy” closure over the summer convinced them to focus on LGBTQ student organizations instead of reapplying for a job through the Foundation.
“I’m still working as hard as I was to make an impact and help students, but now I’m not getting paid for the work that I’m doing,” Simons said.
—Staff writer Wyeth Renwick can be reached at wyeth.renwick@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @wzrenwick.
—Staff writer Nirja J. Trivedi can be reached at nirja.trivedi@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @nirjatriv.
