Boston Magazine writes as a side remark in reporting on the Harvard endowment's troubles (especially the $9 billion in capital calls on the Harvard endowment coming in the next few years for private equity stakes):
Harvard has already halted the hiring of junior faculty and announced
an early retirement program for tenured professors, and for the first
time ever is considering laying off tenured professors.
The only way this can be done is by closing departments or going after clinical professors with tenure in the med school by cutting salaries and raising hours (but that's legally problematic and may not work). So is Boston Magazine confused? Or which departments are being targeted? Yale did get rid of Mechanical Engineering in the 1970s, U Chicago got rid of the education school a few years ago, and sociology departments have been closing nationwide. Who, if anyone, is on the chopping block here?
Finally, The Crimson reports on the crisis on campus.
Update #1: Jody comments:
Lots
of little departments that could arguably be parts of bigger
departments are being cut all over the place. Looking briefly at
Harvard's website, and having heard what's happening elsewhere, but
knowing nothing about the culture at Harvard, I would think the first
choice would be to combine some of those language departments into a
Languages and Linguistics Department. Then you'd look at the "history"
departments that could be combined into other departments. Then all
those different biology departments.
I used to work for the registrar's office at Georgetown, and it gave
me a working knowledge of every department at the university. I am
struck by how many MORE departments Harvard has now than Georgetown did
then. Let me quick check something...
Harvard says the college has 6,678 students; they have 33
departments and 9 "undergraduate degree programs." Georgetown had 6,853
students. The College of Arts and Sciences has 24 departments and 10
"programs" (Catholic Studies, Social and Political Thought, etc). The
School of Business (undergrad) has another 6 departments, it appears,
and then the School of Foreign Service has faculty in all the same
departments as the college, but they have this ridiculous number of
centers, all of which are funded by particular groups (they've gotten
huge donations from the Persian Gulf in the past 15 years) and most of
which are focused on graduate degrees of one kind or another.
In 1992, when I graduated, Georgetown had five undergrad schools:
College, Business, Foreign Service, Languages & Linguistics, and
Nursing. They had far fewer of those centers and there were only 5
business-school departments. In the mid-1990s, they gave SLL to the
College and sent Nursing to the Medical School. (I notice that they
still have what seems like far too many languages departments.) But
Georgetown definitely has far too many administrative overlaps, given
all those centers. Then again, I'm too lazy to figure out how many of
the center directors are also line faculty in regular departments.
Those were the undergrad numbers for Harvard & Georgetown -- I bet Harvard has tons more graduate students, which would affect the demand for departments.
But that's all about consolidating small departments into larger departments. And, as far as I know, those little programs or degree committees don't have tenure slots though they can have non-tenure positions. Laying off a tenured professor means closing their department and not consolidating it into another department, right? There might be a couple odd departments that could be closed at Harvard, like the old Department of Social Relations in 1972 (though I'm not actually clear on its history, including if anybody was laid off when it closed -- I don't think so, it just got split up into existing departments).
Update #2: Arne Duncan, our new Secretary of Education, was a 1987 Harvard Sociology A.B. (after taking a year off to do research on the South Side of Chicago), or so the Harvard Sociology Department web page tells me. Good to see that the few high powered sociology majors do exist -- though in this case it is in part, I assume, because Duncan had a professional basketball career and didn't want to be econ major, and the light work loads of econ and sociology made them two of the prime jock majors. My memory is that sociology majors were for the most part very nice people.
Update #3: the only thing I can come up with is weird situation like the one --- I cannot find the reference now, the NAS member at Harvard doing astronomy who was in this situation, 'tenured' but not actually in the astronomy department -- was in, tenured slots outside of departments but de facto in a department. Ah, it's Margret Geller I was thinking of, the issue there being that she was a professor but not tenured. I thought I had a blog post or two on this, but the events are from before this blog started.
Update #4: Jody follows up:
I bet, if you close a smaller department as part of a consolidation,
you get to lay off as many tenured faculty as you want. So, you close
all the language departments, create a new languages and linguistics
department, and hire brand-new faculty for that department. Maybe some
of them are hold-overs from the old departments. But it's a new
department, and a new process. (Not that I think that looks likely: it
appears that the standard is to have separate departments for all these
different language families.)
I heard of a rural sociology
department that was being closed, and one of the faculty was getting a
new line appointment in the regular sociology department, so they could
keep saying they taught rural sociology, but the rest were leaving.
