# FAS Update: Institutional Resilience October 05, 2026 Dear colleagues, With the academic year now well underway, I want to take a moment to reflect on what we accomplished last year and how that difficult work has positioned us for the year ahead. In evolutionary biology, there has long been a debate about evolvability: whether populations can evolve in ways that make them better able to adapt to future environmental change. In my opinion, the data remain inconclusive. For institutions, there is a similar question. At a time when the external environment has become difficult to predict, can institutions, long known for their stability, become nimble and agile enough to thrive in the present and excel into the future? Harvard is operating in a time of consequential and rapid change. Over the past few years, the academic landscape has shifted dramatically. Federal research funding is no longer stable—from the termination of Harvard’s federal grants to the nationwide slowdown in new grant awards. At the same time, artificial intelligence is advancing at extraordinary speed, creating both opportunities and difficult questions for our teaching, research, and scholarship. **Meeting the moment requires us to be robust and adaptable.** Robustness begins with clarity about our academic mission and the value we provide to our community, our country, and the world. It also requires a strong financial foundation from which we can both respond to immediate shocks and invest strategically in future ambitions. Adaptability involves having the capacity to recalibrate when circumstances shift, and to do so thoughtfully and deliberately—and always with research and teaching excellence as our north star. These qualities seem to pull in opposite directions: robustness implies stability, while adaptability requires change. In fact, they reinforce one another. A strong foundation and clear focus give us the capacity to adapt deliberately, while adaptability allows us to remain strong as the world around us changes. ## Reflecting on last year Last year, we made difficult choices. Following the termination of federal grants and the resulting decline in our unrestricted resources, we made the difficult decision to reduce Ph.D. admissions. This decision was necessary to bring the size of incoming cohorts into closer alignment with the resources available to support them, even as we understood the consequences for our programs and for prospective students. We also engaged every unit in budget planning to make structural cost reductions, reduced non-ladder faculty budgets, and undertook an extensive administrative restructuring. All of these actions required real sacrifice, even as they have strengthened our financial position. Together they have helped create a foundation from which we can begin to undertake new work, including the resumption of ladder faculty hiring this fall, with 25 searches launching across the FAS. Administrative changes have been particularly challenging because of the length of the process, the toll it has taken on staff, and the local impacts experienced in departments, centers, and administrative units. We have asked staff to navigate these changes even as departments look to them to continue their critical work in support of our mission. This period of transition is at a particularly difficult moment—the new administrative structure is not yet in place, important details are still being finalized, and the benefits of the changes are not yet visible. Completing the transition will allow a different kind of work to begin, one of continuous improvement. The new administrative model was intentionally designed, in both its [structure](/navigating-fas-administrative-services "Navigating FAS Administrative Services") and [governance](https://officeofthesecretary.fas.harvard.edu/other-committees), to help us work more effectively. Strong feedback mechanisms and clear measures of performance will allow us to identify problems earlier, simplify cumbersome processes, and reduce unnecessary bureaucracy. The model’s success will be judged by whether we have become more robust and adaptable: more consistent and reliable in our core functions and more responsive when new challenges arise. That will take some time to become apparent and to gain the trust of our community in this new way of working together. ## Looking ahead The actions described above have strengthened our financial position, but they will not, on their own, resolve [our structural deficit](https://current.fas.harvard.edu/stories/deep-structural-deficit-fas-forces-longer-game-reset). There is urgency to this work: each year the deficit persists, it further constrains our choices and makes more challenging the burden we carry forward. At the same time, it would not be responsible to attempt to close a deficit of this magnitude in a single year, or even within a few years. Rather, we need to set ourselves on a longer-term path of sustained progress, making disciplined decisions and recognizing trade-offs. Continuing this longer-term work will be a central focus of the coming year. As you know, one of our largest areas of expense is our physical campus: operating, maintaining, and renewing our 241 largely historical buildings, which house our teaching, research, and community. Given the scale of the expense, strategic planning and discipline can have a significant impact. With guidance from the [Faculty Resources Committee](https://officeofthesecretary.fas.harvard.edu/ad-hoc-committees), **we are developing a forward-looking plan for capital expenses with a 10- to 20-year planning horizon.** Rather than being constrained to make decisions building by building or responding only to urgent problems, we need to better position ourselves to assess needs across the FAS, set priorities, sequence investments, and fix problems before they become more costly and disruptive. Similarly, our new administrative structure will, over the long term, allow us to pursue further cost savings in other aspects of our budget. For example, we are starting to revisit our policies and practices that may no longer serve us well and are now better able to roll out new changes, support implementation, and reduce risk. We are already simplifying requirements for the processing of receipts and streamlining purchasing approvals. We are also working to coordinate procurement across units, allowing us to take advantage of economies of scale. Actions like these have been difficult in the past because of our highly siloed structure. Because of the efforts we have made collectively, I was able to approve an increase in [graduate admissions levels](/news/2026/10/phd-admissions-levels "Ph.D. Admissions Levels"), above what we projected last year. As we move forward, a faculty committee will develop a framework for determining the future size of the Ph.D. student cohort, giving programs the financial stability and predictability to plan, while establishing clear and transparent principles for adapting responsibly if circumstances change. **Finally, through our academic planning process, departments are developing 3- to 5-year plans to help identify our highest priorities, in part to shape how we reenergize faculty hiring, as resources allow.** Academic planning will complement other processes currently underway in the Divisions to define shared academic priorities. This comes on top of the University’s recent announcement of new [investments in research](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2026/09/harvard-launches-150-million-research-initiative). ## Putting the mission first None of these efforts will be easy to get right, but I have confidence in this community. That confidence is grounded in progress that we have already made together: improvements in [civil discourse](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/11/building-momentum-on-open-inquiry); work to address [grade inflation and compression](https://current.fas.harvard.edu/stories/faculty-decisively-approve-grading-changes?utm_source=Unknown+List&utm_campaign=5573c42681-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2026_10_05_03_54&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-5573c42681-); efforts to recenter [the classroom](https://current.fas.harvard.edu/stories/palpable-shift-academic-culture) as a place of serious intellectual engagement; and the evolving work to address the implications of AI for teaching and research, led by the [AI Faculty Advisory Group](/news/2026/10/senior-adviser-ai-transition "Senior Adviser on AI Transition"), the Office of Undergraduate Education, and the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. When we are honest about the challenges we face, bring our collective judgment to bear, and remain clear about our academic purpose, we can make meaningful change and do so quickly. We now need to bring that same candor, judgment, and clarity of purpose to our long-term thinking. Too often our resources are stretched across more priorities than they can adequately support, and, at the same time, our processes remain cumbersome. But the agenda described here is intended to address both problems: to make the FAS more robust by building a stronger foundation to allow ambition to flourish, and to make it more adaptable so that we can respond to new challenges and opportunities with greater speed and purpose. These choices are not ends in themselves. They are in service of putting our resources—intellectual, financial, and administrative—behind our core mission. A robust institution is not one that simply has resources; it is one that has the stability to take risks, by investing in its highest priorities and its biggest ambitions. An adaptable institution is not one that changes constantly; it is one that can respond deliberately to changing circumstances without losing sight of its purpose. **Ultimately, the goal is to give our community what may be most precious: the time, support, and resources we need to flourish as teachers, mentors, scholars, researchers, and staff. It is to create the conditions in which good ideas can move forward, excellent people can do their best work, and our ambitions are matched by our capacity to support them.** The external landscape ahead may be uncertain, but my confidence in this community is not. Our collective efforts will give us the ability to not just survive in the years ahead, but to thrive. Sincerely, Hopi --- Hopi Hoekstra *Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences* *C. Y. Chan Professor of Arts and Science* *Xiaomeng Tong and Yu Chen Professor of Life Sciences* See also:- [ Academics & Research ](/news-categories/academics-research) - [ Messages from the Dean ](/news-categories/messages-dean)