The Great Hangover by Vanity Fair

Author:Vanity Fair
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

‘There are going to be a hell of a lot of layoffs. Courses will be cut. Class sizes will get bigger,” conceded a Harvard insider, who, like every other administrator on campus, was not permitted to speak openly to me on the classified subject of alignments and resizements and belt-tightenings.

Radical change is coming to Harvard. Fewer professors, for one thing. Fewer teaching assistants, janitors, and support staff. Shuttered libraries. Less money for research and travel and books. Cafés replaced by vending machines. Junior-varsity sports teams downgraded to clubs. No raises. No bonuses. No fresh coats of paint or new carpets. Overflowing trash cans.

The recession has been hard on most Americans. We know that. At Harvard, however, adjusting to the end of the gilded age, the champagne age, is proving especially wrenching: the university’s endowment has collapsed, donations are down, budgets are overstretched. With so many enormous fixed costs—and with much of its endowment restricted by the narrowly defined wishes of donors—there’s almost no room left to maneuver.

What’s more, the university is facing the onerous financial consequences of over-building. Consider this: Over the 20-year period from 1980 to 2000, Harvard University added nearly 3.2 million square feet of new space to its campus. But that’s nothing compared with the extravagance that followed. So far this decade, from 2000 through 2008, Harvard has added another 6.2 million square feet of new space, roughly equal to the total number of square feet occupied by the Pentagon. All across campus, one after another, new academic buildings have shot up. The price of these optimistic new projects: a breathtaking $4.3 billion.

In Allston, a Boston neighborhood just across the Charles River from the school’s main campus, you can view Harvard’s billion-dollar hole in the ground, a vast construction pit. It’s the foundation of Harvard’s most ambitious project of all: the sprawling Allston Science Complex, once scheduled to be completed by 2011 at a cost of $1.2 billion—but now on hold.

It’s become a symbol, that vast hole in the ground, yet another indication that Harvard University is facing the worst, most dangerous financial crisis in its 373-year history. Adding to the instability: the university is on its fourth president in eight years. And every few weeks, or so it seems, Harvard announces the departure of yet another administrator—most recently the university’s executive vice president, Edward Forst, who just last year came to Harvard from Goldman Sachs and intends to step down on August 1.

“They have to do what business people do—they have to make hard decisions,” one Harvard business professor told me, referring to the university’s administrators. But, of course, Harvard is not a business, nor is it being run like a business; it’s a distinguished, high-minded research university, arguably the greatest university in the nation. “Balancing their budget is going to be very traumatic for them,” the professor added, in case I’d missed his point.

Already, the inevitable recriminations and backbiting have started. Harvard is in trouble, and no one can decide who’s to blame, or what to do next.

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