Dear President Faust,

The Student Labor Action Movement would like to thank Bill Murphy, Director of Labor Relations, for responding to the letter we addressed to you. We have had productive and clarifying discussions with Mr. Murphy in the past, and would like to continue communicating with the administration at all levels. We look forward to meeting with Mr. Murphy in the coming week.

However, after 25 days, we have yet to receive a response from you, President Faust, concerning our letter, and the approach that the University has taken towards budget cuts. Mr. Murphy, while he does facilitate discussion, does not have the responsibility that you, President Faust, hold as a key member of the Harvard Corporation, and as head of the University. You have significant influence over the scope and magnitude of reductions in wages, benefits, and hours. It is difficult to imagine how decisions about budget cuts can be made without input from the faculty, students, and workers.

During your address to the incoming class of 2013, you claimed to have met with SLAM, even though you have not met with us in any official capacity. We must assume that you were referring to your office hours on April 23rd, 2009, during which several SLAM members attended as individuals to speak with you about how budget cuts will directly affect hired and subcontracted workers at Harvard. Though we appreciated meeting with you as individuals, this is not an example of the collective, open dialogue we are seeking. While we look forward to student input on the budgetary working groups, we worry about the nature of your “periodic communications,” as Bill Murphy calls them in his letter. Instead of opportunities for open dialogue, we have been fielded piecemeal, obscure, and largely one-way communications. Yale’s strategy of asking the general community for suggestions has never even been discussed. In one especially telling example, during the last town hall meeting with Dean Smith and Dean Hammonds, Dean Smith demonstrated a clear lack of familiarity with the Final Report of the Harvard Committee on Employment and Contracting Policies, better known as the Katz Committee Report. SLAM finds it difficult to approach these meetings in good faith when the top administrators cannot answer questions about the University’s own public statements about labor relations. Moreover, certain budgetary suggestions, such as a graduated salary reduction for top administrators and professors similar to those at Stanford, Harvard’s primary competitor for the best salaries in academia, have yet to be seriously and publicly discussed. We are certain that a more open reciprocal dialogue among the workers, faculty, students, and administrators would give rise to a more equitable, fair, and ultimately productive approach to budgetary management.

President Faust, we still await an answer from you, and our concerns will not be allayed until we are satisfied that fair and equitable decisions, made with the input of the entire Harvard community, are made with respect to budget cuts. SLAM sympathizes with the difficult decisions you must face. We would like to make sure that these decisions match your stated commitment to helping build community globally and locally.

We reiterate our gratitude for the town hall meetings and communications from the administration, but these have become solely venues for “questions and answers”; they are not discussions that allow us to enact a community-based response to the financial crunch at Harvard. We are asking for a meeting between you, President Faust, and SLAM that privileges open dialogue, thus paving the way for an alternative, more democratic approach to this crisis.

Sincerely,

The Student Labor Action Movement