Members of SLAM delivered this letter to President Faust in Eliot Dining on April 14 at lunch along with a "Greed Is the New Crimson" t-shirt. We have requested a meeting with the President and Corporation no later than April 30, 2009. We have not yet received any response from the President or Corporation.  read more »

Harvard will not solve its budget crisis until it confronts and engages two truths.

1. Workers--every worker, including the lowest paid janitor or library technician--are vital to the "core mission" of educating and intellectual research.

2. Notions of severe inequality govern the current distribution and determination of salaries of Harvard employees. Acceptance of this situation is widespread and rarely articulated, allowing it to persist even in times of crisis.

The first truth is a positive affirmation and must be embraced more fully. The second truth is a description of a negative reality that must be changed to reflect the first truth. What does this mean? In exploring and formulating solutions to the budget shortfalls, workers with lower incomes must be understood as a central part of this University. Equally important, the reduction of the severe wage disparity within the Harvard community must become a live option to address the budget situation.

The FAS meeting yesterday only further indicates that the leadership of Harvard remains in denial about these truths and the paths of action they imply. These paths require Harvard to tread a hard path--the path of courage, creativity, and shared sacrifice.

The other path--that of inequality, hypocrisy, and greed--may seem attractive. But, this path led our university, nation, and global economic system to the current crisis (see Frank Rich's recent, robust critique of the connection between Harvard, Larry Summers, "the bubble culture" of the mid-2000s, and the current financial crisis.)

In this post, I lift up several schools as examples for Harvard to emulate and follow.

Yesterday at lunch, members of the Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM) dropped banners in Annenberg (the first-year dining hall), advocating against layoffs. Many remark how this space resembles the Great Hall of Hogwarts. In the spirit of JK Rowling, SLAM urges all students NOT to be Slytherins, by supporting people over profits and equally valuing all members within our community.

Felix Salmon, a financial news commentator with Portfolio.com (a blog on economic issues owned by CondéNash) offers this excellent analysis of why--even after the significant drop in the endowment announced in November 2008--Harvard is still in a very, very good place.

Simply phrased, Harvard's endowment dropped about 22% last year, from $36.9 billion to $28.8 billion. No one denies that this is a major drop. Yet, it remains, by far, the wealthiest university, in the world. In Salmon's words, "The fact of [Harvard's endowment] decline is no reason for panic."

Yet, the world's wealthiest university and the world's second wealthiest non-profit has responded with a mixture of panic, fear, and greed befitting the worst excesses of Wall Street firms, such as AIG and Bear Stearns that played a crucial role in precipitating the current global economic crisis.  read more »

Felix Salmon, a financial news commentator with Portfolio.com (a blog on economic issues owned by CondéNash) offers this excellent analysis of why--even after the significant drop in the endowment announced in November 2008--Harvard is still in a very, very good place.

Simply phrased, Harvard's endowment dropped about 22% last year, from $36.9 billion to $28.8 billion. No one denies that this is a major drop. Yet, it remains, by far, the wealthiest university, in the world. In Salmon's words, "The fact of [Harvard's endowment] decline is no reason for panic."

Yet, the world's wealthiest university and the world's second wealthiest non-profit has responded with a mixture of panic, fear, and greed befitting the worst excesses of Wall Street firms, such as AIG and Bear Stearns that played a crucial role in precipitating the current global economic crisis.

In the past months, dozens of workers have been laid off. (Most recently at the Medical School.) Such layoffs echo far beyond the individual workers laid off: entire families are pushed far closer to (or even into) homelessness, lose health care, and suffer a reduction in nutrition. More broadly, combined with reduction in hours and work speed ups, Harvard has whipped up an atmosphere of fear among workers to rush many into taking buyout and early retirement packages.

Although Harvard refuses to speak of these layoffs as connected or part of a broader policy, they clearly emerged from the tone of "hard choices" set by President Faust in her November 11, 2008 letter. Unfortunately, many in the Harvard community have accepted the University administration's claim that such cuts are necessary and "cannot be averted." This is simply not true.

Consider MIT down the street and Boston University across the river--schools with far smaller endowments than Harvard (about $7 billion and $800 million respectively.) They have responded to the crisis with far greater creativity and courage. The administrations of both MIT and BU have engaged the full university community in open, town hall style meetings and have discussed many other creative options to trim budgets rather than layoffs.

Meanwhile, down at fellow Ivy institution Princeton and at West Coast peer Stanford , top administrators have taken salary cuts to preserve the quality of education and avoid layoffs of lower-paid workers.

Harvard is uniquely positioned to respond with courage, creativity, and an ethos of shared sacrifice to this economic crisis. It has tremendous financial reserves and is not bound to work towards a profit for shareholders as publicly traded companies must. In a time when Harvard should be leading, they are moving in a retrograde direction, acting out of fear and greed.

Returning to Salmon's article:

If you're big enough to lose $8 billion on mark-to-market investment losses, you're certainly big enough to find $1.6 billion to spend on your stated purpose of helping to run the university. Obviously, Harvard would prefer it if the endowment had gone up rather than down. But the fact of its decline is no reason for panic.

This logic easily extends to layoffs and cutting back hours for already lower-paid workers: Harvard is big enough to continue to pay all its current workers a living wage. The Student Labor Action Movement demands that Harvard immediately halt all layoffs, recall workers fired since October 2008, and to engage the economic crisis in a more transparent, participatory, and community-focused way.