Faculty meetings catered by  Dunkin' Donuts?

Harvard faces
fiscal crisis

By Charles van Doren
Education Editor

STOWE, Vt. – Its endowment hit by the collapse of the nonpublic highly leveraged illiquid hedge fund investments it had long championed, Harvard is facing the grim necessity of painful budget cutbacks.

 
Harvard's budget woes may force the replacement of traditional four-course faculty lunches with Dunkin' Donuts and Cheez Whiz

The news that Ma Harvard's udders have been exhausted is sure to stoke faculty discontent at the perpetually roiling bastion of higher education.

Already, the package of budget cuts announced over the Christmas holidays by President Drew Faust has raised grave concerns among those members of the Harvard faculty not flogging their résumés around Washington, D.C.

Faust's proposal to target traditional faculty perks like administrative and teaching assistants has raised a storm of opposition. "Grade undergraduate exams and papers? What is this – Amherst?"  hissed Government Professor Harvey Mansfield. "How can I produce the noble insights for which I am famous if I have to waste time with undergraduates?" He accused President Faust of fostering "slave morality."

Over at the Economics Department, whose tenured heavyweights are seeking to best John Kenneth Galbraith's thus far unsurpassed 25-year record of refusing to acknowledge the existence of Harvard undergraduates, the mood is equally combative. Former Bush Administration apologist Professor Gregory Mankiw, found struggling in vain to operate the departmental copy machine, complained that the proposed reallocation of resources away from faculty support was "suboptimal." He suggested raising money by auctioning off undergraduate admissions slots to the highest bidder, which he termed "efficient."  

Faust's spending cuts also target other treasured faculty perks such as paid travel to academic "conferences," which by sheer coincidence are normally held in European cities in the summer and tropical resorts in the winter. "Do you have any idea what it's like to spend all winter in Cambridge?" asked former O.J. Simpson mouthpiece and Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz, presumably rhetorically. [What else? – Ed.] "I'd rather have bamboo shoots hammered under my fingernails," he said, reprising one of his most highly regarded policy prescriptions. 

In response to President Faust's proposals, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences is pulling together its own package of budget cuts. Among the favored proposals are turning down the heat in all undergraduate houses to 60 degrees and cutting back on food plan luxuries, like meat, desserts, and fresh fruits and vegetables. "The undergrads eat like pigs," complained University Professor Larry Summers.

However, sources close to Faust note that such reductions in undergraduate rations were tried last year and provoked a firestorm of protest from the parents of Harvard students who refused to pay higher board fees for soup kitchen fare.

Some senior faculty are also rumored to be considering cutbacks in undergraduate education and other areas they regard as unnecessary luxuries that are peripheral to the core mission of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

When the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences returns from its ski vacations in Gstaad (Prof. Galbraith's favorite), it will meet in University Hall's Faculty Room to debate potential painful cuts in the GSAS budget.

Even in the plummy Brighton quadrangles of Harvard Business School, the faculty is contemplating cutbacks in the wake of the indictment and/or bankruptcy of most of the school's donor base. Already the Business School spa has reduced the hours of its 24-hour masseuse service, and, if conditions worsen, may be forced to suspend Sunday massage service altogether. In another economy move, the Business School gym will keep their existing treadmills and elliptical exercisers in service, rather than replacing them as planned with more advanced computerized sensor versions. Grumbled one exasperated B-school student struggling with a balky rowing machine:  "What the f*** is this, UMass?"

At the end of the day, President Faust and the University's governing Fellows are, like millions of other Americans, turning in desperation to the incoming Obama Administration for relief. Said one anonymous Massachusetts Hall source: "If Obama will take 50 tenured faculty off our hands, we could save a bloody fortune and no one will ever notice that they're gone."