News agencies are reporting that Harvard University is laying off 275 of its employees due to the drop in endowments. Most of the layoffs were in the administrative, technical, and clerical sectors. This is always an additional burden for the remaining workers. On one hand they are luck to have kept their jobs. On another, they have to take up the slack of the laid off employees.
Since Harvard is one of the richest schools, it definitely shows this is a difficult economy when its endowments are down. As Harvard has a tradition of graduating students who go on to notable success in every industry, one has to wonder if they are kicking in some bucks as a show of gratitude. When considering that there are Wall Street Executives who went o Harvard, you would think they have parted with at least a portion of their bonus money to keep up the University’s finer traditions. But who knows?
Harvard has kept faculty salaries at their current rates for a couple of years now. Five hundred employees opted for voluntary retirement. There are other cost cutting measure in effect. But when one thinks that this economic downturn has affected Harvard so adversely, you have to wonder what smaller, poorer colleges and universities are going through.
One supposes at Harvard and other colleges and universities the human resources departments are very quiet these days. No recruitment, no pre-employment screening. No background checks. Just some bored and worried human resource personnel bored and worried for their own jobs. People doing busy work, catching up on paperwork, playing with their paper clips in order to pass the time of day. Before cobwebs emerge from their filing cabinets, perhaps the economy will turn around. Once thing for sure, for most schools around the country, this recession has certainly been an education.
