Even Harvard is cutting back!
I read this in the Chronicle this morning:
Facing projections of a 30-percent drop in its endowment, Harvard will freeze salaries for faculty members and nonunion staff members, suspend nearly all searches for tenure-track and tenured professors, and place restrictions on hiring instructional faculty members, The Harvard Crimson reported today.
The announcement, which comes a week after Harvard revealed that its endowment had lost at least $8-billion since June 30, was sent to department heads in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences yesterday and will be the subject of a faculty meeting today, the newspaper said.
it would, of course, be great to have a large enough endowment that one could actually lose $8 billion! Some of the comments about the article suggest that the great minds at Harvard have not managed their endowments very well.
Comments
Margaret Soltan, an English professor at George Washington University has an excellent post on this situation at her site, University Diaries.
The link is:
http://www.margaretsoltan.com/?p=6740
Congratulations to the Dean for having this blog. Some other administration types - OurLeader and OurProvost - should do likewise.
Posted by: Bill Gleason | December 10, 2008 4:30 PM
Oh, my.
Posted by: JT | December 10, 2008 9:42 PM
I was visiting Stanford the third week of January. They have also canceled many faculty searches, and have asked all academic units to prepare budgets reflecting 3%, 5%, and 7% cuts.
Seems the endowment is down several billion dollars...
Posted by: Sashank Varma | January 31, 2009 3:44 PM