Resizing and Reshaping

A couple of days ago, President Drew Faust sent an e-mail to “Members of the Harvard Community” commenting on the events of the past year for her university. She acknowledged the serious economic problems that have confronted Harvard this year, but was upbeat: “Our focus belongs not on what we have lost, but on what we have.” She urged Harvardians “not for a moment to forget the immense contributions that our community continues to make to the advancement of knowledge.” Like the president of Princeton, speaking at our commencement, she also stressed that “the learning that happens here can help us improvise through times of uncertainty and come out stronger and wiser, more resilient, more adaptable, and better prepared to lead fulfilling lives.” But careful readers of Faust’s message will have noticed Faust’s acknowledgment en passant that Harvard must “resize and reshape aspects of our enterprise.” We may be living in an age in which resizing and reshaping will replace sifting and winnowing.

This morning the Princeton administration held the second in what is beginning to look like a series of town meetings on the financial problems of the university. The event was held in one of our largest lecture rooms, but the crowd overflowed the space — to the extent that an announcement was made that another meeting would be held in a couple of weeks to accommodate those who could not find a seat today. I would guess that there were six or seven hundred in attendance, mostly members of the professional staff — I could identify only a few other faculty members.

The provost led off, summarizing the financial situation — a 30-percent decline in the endowment, a $170-million budget gap over the next two years, and an administrative budget decline of about 7.5 percent per annum. These figures were just about identical to the numbers announced at the first town meeting last April. What was new was the emphasis on a projected 13-percent decline in FTE/compensation portion of the budget for the next two years, to be accomplished by the elimination of visiting faculty positions, a slowdown in the replacement of departing faculty and possible changes in the compensation mix (more junior faculty?). We were told that we need to reduce staff positions by 100 to 150 by July 2010 (we are halfway to that goal), and warned that there may be layoffs in the fall. We were also shown a long list of possible changes to reduce university costs — new ideas will be welcome at savings@princeton.edu. But the big news was the recently announced VIRP program — Voluntary Incentivized Retirement Program — through which the university hopes to induce some of a pool of 459 fairly senior employees (staff and faculty) to retire. It became clear when the VP for HR rose to speak about “the VIRP” that most of the audience had come to hear about this program.

We heard a great deal about Princeton’s need to “resize” this morning. On the other hand, our staff and faculty did not hear anything about “reshaping.” The question I was left with was whether we can actually resize without reshaping? I am inclined to doubt it.