Dear Colleagues,
As we navigate a period of uncertainty for higher education and for Harvard, in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences we continue our work to build financial capacity and resiliency. As many of you are aware, the FAS has long had a structural deficit; simply put, our expenses outpace our revenues. This combined with current financial uncertainties – from potential reductions in federal funding to increases in taxation of endowment income – makes our work even more urgent.
The recently announced pause in faculty and staff hiring, and the decision to stop admission offers to graduate students on waitlists, are temporary measures to provide us with time to do the hard, strategic work ahead. This work will require your partnership. As we move forward, the following principles will guide decision making, with consistency and fairness, and enable the tradeoffs that will be necessary so that we may – as we must – emerge with our academic mission intact. Now is the time to be clear as a Faculty about what’s most important to us.
Strength in our core academic mission of research and teaching is our foundational commitment and our top priority. It’s central to who we are as an institution. Putting our mission first and setting clear academic priorities will provide the strongest framework for confronting the headwinds and hard choices that will come. This means we cannot be an institution that tries to be all things to all people. Instead, we must be the very best in the world at the things that we choose to pursue. That is why I am working closely with Divisional and SEAS leadership and engaging with Department Chairs to identify academic priorities for the FAS.
Administratively, we must also operate differently – seizing the opportunity of collaboration and connection to solve problems. We must work to dismantle silos that do not serve us and break through barriers to academic and administrative collaboration. We must create an environment that prioritizes administrative efficiency in enabling our academic mission and achieves nimbleness and flexibility through coordination, collaboration, and co-investment. We must also be willing to try new things, knowing that new approaches will not always be successful. Innovation requires risk-taking and patience, and sometimes failure. For all of us, this means being willing to be part of change and good faith partners.
While some things we do today must change, just as importantly, we must safeguard academic freedom and the rights and responsibilities that are essential to our ability to fully pursue our academic mission. Our aspirations require an environment defined by open inquiry, intellectual honesty, and scholarly rigor, as well as respect for the dignity of every member of our community. On that foundation, we are best able to be a learning community that rewards curiosity and collaboration and ensures that we continue to find joy in our scholarship, in our teaching, and in each other.
Equally important is our commitment to building a community that brings together and supports a range of perspectives and opinions. At the heart of this is our students, whose different backgrounds, experiences, and passions contribute to our dynamic educational environment. When we learn with and from one another – that’s when we realize our full academic potential. This means we must prioritize access to a Harvard education for students and continue our urgent work ensuring a culture that capitalizes on the range of perspectives our students bring to our classrooms, laboratories, residential houses and to our campus.
Together, these commitments – to academic excellence, to administrative efficiency, to academic freedom and open inquiry, and to a community that supports all of its members – are essential to our success as a School and a University. And these commitments are guiding me as dean.
While the environment we are operating in is fluid, our commitment to our core academic mission of excellence in teaching and research – in service to the public good – remains unchanged. Our values as an institution endure. There’s a lot we don’t know about what lies ahead. One thing is clear: when we work together as a community, we are best able to overcome challenges and to advance Harvard’s intellectual leadership – now and for the generations to come.
Sincerely,
Hopi
Hopi Hoekstra
Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences
C. Y. Chan Professor of Arts and Sciences
Xiaomeng Tong and Yu Chen Professor of Life Sciences