When the Going Gets Tough, Stick it to Working People

Harvard University is running a deficit of $34 million and the Harvards are pretty darn upset about it.

According to a USA Today report, Harvard’s costs are up and its revenue isn’t keeping pace.  The university’s vice president of finance and treasurer issued a report describing the extent of the problem and wrote about the need to manage costs better and pursue “innovative revenue opportunities.”

But then the Harvards got down to business.

Reducing costs of benefits can be difficult because they are “experienced at a more personal level,” they said. “Yet these changes are inevitable and will allow us to protect the integrity of the high-quality teaching and research that has allowed Harvard to lead throughout the centuries.”

And that’s really what they’re after:  “reducing the cost of benefits.”  This fabulously wealthy and prestigious institution, with a deficit that’s less than one percent of its overall revenue, looks like it’s laying the groundwork for sticking it to working people:  its employees – and not those who do “the high-quality teaching and research that has allowed Harvard to lead throughout the centuries.”

In other words, it’s not going to hit the pensions and benefits of its professors and researchers and it’s certainly not going to do anything to hurt all those administrators that colleges and universities seem to be growing like weeds on a summer lawn.  But it sounds like the people who manage the information systems and technology, maintain the grounds, keep the schedules, staff the library, clean the research labs, send out the tuition bills, evaluate student applications, and generally keep the university running are about to get their butts kicked.  That’s what the university’s vice president of finance and treasurer mean when they write that “Reducing costs of benefits can be difficult because they are ‘experienced at a more personal level’” – because seeing your pension reduced and your benefits cut is personal.

Very personal.

But what’s a university to do when it only has $32.7 billion in the bank?  After all, you certainly can’t expect university officials to deplete a whole one percent of their endowment, can you?  At that rate it would be gone in, what, a hundred years?  No, they could never do that, not even when it was only two months ago that university officials announced a campaign to raise another $6.5 billion because, you know, if you’ve only got $32.7 billion in the bank you’re at serious risk of going belly up.

A $32.7 billion endowment.  A $6.5 billion fundraising campaign.  But by all means, let’s start the economizing discussion with the benefits paid to working-class employees.

 

Tagged: Harvard deficit, Harvard University, the war against working people