Hard Times at Harvard

Harvard University is feeling an unaccustomed pinch, as it tightens its belt another few notches in an effort to deal with its withering endowment, the Boston Globe reports. The university depends on its endowment — which last June was valued at $36.9-billion, but is expected to plummet more than 30 percent by the end of this month — to help cover about a third of its daily operating expenses, the newspaper notes. As a result, Harvard officials told the Globe, the world’s richest university can no longer afford to replace top scholars who retire or are poached by other universities, which has many professors fretting about the university’s academic standing and the impact on its students.

“Without replacing key faculty, Harvard will be unable to run graduate programs in certain specialties and risks damaging its academic reputation,” classics professor Mark Schiefsky told the newspaper. His department, which is already sans two classical archeologists, is about to lose an ancient-history specialist, too. “These areas have had a pretty strong tradition here,’’ Schiefsky said. “We have to be careful that things don’t die.’’

Theda Skocpol, former president of the American Political Science Association and a professor in Harvard’s department of government, which has lost at least four faculty members this year, seconded that thought and told the Globe that the university’s standing may already be hurting in some fields. “Harvard’s relative standing among the major universities will suffer,’’ she said. “It already has in some fields, and it will continue to if we can’t keep moving.’’

In addition, Harvard’s economics, statistics, and physics departments are also feeling the pain, the Boston daily writes.

Still, not everyone is worried. Gary King, a government professor who directs the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, told the Globe that cuts or no cuts, Harvard will remain a top university: “Of course, Harvard was a great university in 2005 and so will still be after the cuts.’’