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Harvard faculty said they were frustrated with the recent reductions in Ph.D. admission numbers at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, even as some accepted the cuts as a difficult but necessary step to shore up the school’s precarious finances.
Professors acknowledged that the FAS, which revealed this week that it is running an estimated $365 million structural deficit, faces steep financial challenges that will require significant cost-cutting. But some said the reductions to Ph.D. programs went too far.
“Seventy-five percent cuts are savage — are massive and savage — and seem disproportionate to any other cutting,” former University President Lawrence H. Summers said last week. “I hope that with incremental funding, exception processes, or other means, that they will not materialize.”
Others expressed less outright opposition to the reductions. While the cuts would severely impact teaching and scholarly research at Harvard, they said, the move was needed to address the budgetary challenges facing the FAS.
“Of course I am sad about the cut but I am glad that we are moving towards financial sustainability and I understand that the pain needs to be spread around,” Economics professor Edward L. Glaeser wrote in a statement to The Crimson.
FAS Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra announced late last month that the school would shrink the number of seats it offers to new Ph.D. admits for the next two years. The reductions amounted to 75 percent in the Science division, approximately 60 percent in the Arts & Humanities division, and at least 50 percent in the Social Science division.
At the time, Hoekstra justified the reductions by pointing to an increase in the federal endowment tax and uncertainty about research funding. During a Tuesday faculty meeting, she said the decision was also made in part to continue supporting current students. The cost of funding Ph.D. students in the Science division whose federal funding was cut last year was $20 million, she added.
The FAS has spent much of this year cutting costs. It halted staff hiring, kept its budget flat, and closed a beloved campus cafe this year amid mounting funding pressures from multibillion dollar funding cuts and an endowment tax hike that could cost Harvard $300 million per year.
But in the eyes of critics, the Ph.D. reductions affect more fundamental parts of Harvard that make the institution unique: the education of undergraduates and the robust scholarly cohorts that serve as training grounds for new generations of scholars.
Classics professor Richard F. Thomas said his department would reduce its admissions numbers from five Ph.D. students to just two each year for the next two years. With a smaller cohort, he said, the famously intimate Classics courses for undergraduates might be forced to expand.
“One of the reasons an undergraduate would come to Harvard would be to have a section of 18 in a GenEd course or a large lecture course, with discussion and a qualified instructor, i.e., a graduate student,” Thomas said. “What’s going to happen to that?”
Training young, talented scholars could also be harder with the Ph.D. reductions. History professor Derek J. Penslar, who directs Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies, wrote in a statement that he appreciated the University’s precarious financial situation — but doubted whether the University could continue hosting leading doctoral programs with the admissions reductions.
“I don’t see how academic units can maintain viable doctoral programs in the face of such massive reductions in admissions,” Penslar said. “The potential damage to our intellectual community and the management of undergraduate courses is vast.”
Others questioned why the FAS decided to make such drastic reductions to Ph.D. admissions instead of first addressing what they see as administrative bloat at the school. Since 2004, the number of full-time administrators at Harvard has ballooned by 43 percent.
“I believe that the massive increase in administrative personnel, measured in the thousands at the University, is a better target for austerity, to the extent that austerity is necessary,” Summers said.
There are some indications that the FAS might be considering reductions to its administration. The Task Force on Workforce Planning, Hoekstra wrote last spring, might recommend “proposals for staff reorganizations and reductions.”
And Economics professor David I. Laibson ’88, who serves on the Resources Committee, a group that devised the recent estimate of the FAS structural deficit, cautioned against evaluating the cuts in graduate admissions before other potential budgetary changes have been implemented.
“Just because something hasn’t been announced yet doesn’t mean it isn’t in conversation and something that will emerge in the months to come,” Laibson said.
Harvard’s Ph.D. reductions stand in contrast to other elite universities, most of which have not publicly announced across-the-board changes to graduate admissions. At Yale University, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is considering lowering its graduate student enrollment in the humanities and social sciences by 12 percent over the next three years, according to the Yale Daily News — a considerably shallower reduction.
The University of Pennsylvania’s School of Arts and Sciences is planning to expand its number of Ph.D. admissions slots for this upcoming cycle, after the university reduced admissions by one third last spring in response to federal funding cuts, The Daily Pennsylvanian reported.
Some faculty said that though Harvard’s admissions reductions would hurt their programs, they backed the decision. Harvard Business School professor William C. Kirby, a former dean of the FAS, wrote in a statement to The Crimson that the reduction will put the school in a “better position to rebound” as it plans for the future.
Kirby added that the cuts might seem egregiously large to faculty because they follow a recent trend of gradual reductions to Ph.D. admission slots at Harvard. The significant costs brought by graduate student unionization, coupled with a shrinking job market for academics, has resulted in smaller graduate cohorts in recent years, Kirby wrote.
At the Tuesday faculty meeting, Hoekstra indicated that the school would reassess its finances next year and potentially admit more students. But for some professors, any reduction in admissions has already caused unnecessarily harm to Harvard’s undergraduates and the world’s next cohort of leading scholars.
“This is the future. These guys would be our future,” Organismic and Evolutionary Biology professor Bence P. Ölveczky said. “It seems to me we shouldn’t give up on them.”
—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.
—Staff writer Veronica H. Paulus can be reached at veronica.paulus@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @VeronicaHPaulus.
