Harvard to slash it's own bureacracy?

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Inside Harvard’s Campaign to Slash Its Own Bureaucracy

University starts layoffs in bid to streamline complexities, like 67-step hiring process; ‘a gigantic battleship with a lot of barnacles’

By Roshan Fernandez, WSJ

July 17, 2026 1:12 pm ET

Harvard is launching one of its largest reorganizations in years, expected to result in hundreds of staff cuts and job changes over the next month.

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CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—Harvard is kicking off one of the university’s largest reorganizations in years—an endeavor expected to result in hundreds of staff cuts and job changes.

The moves, announced this week, are the culmination of Harvard’s yearslong effort to simplify its structure—but even the process to reduce bureaucracy has proven incredibly bureaucratic. The changes take aim at a projected $365 million structural deficit, a longstanding issue exacerbated by the Trump administration’s funding disruptions and endowment-tax hike.

The school is calling the streamlining a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to reduce complexity within its largest unit that includes the undergraduate college and Ph.D. programs. It currently takes 67 steps to hire a new staff member; some department administrators use over 60 different systems; and there are over 1,500 unique job titles for about 2,300 staff within the restructuring scope.

Behind the scenes, the restructuring process was nearly as complicated. It included a three-phase plan, months of interviews and data collection, years of financial reviews, scores of faculty and staff, and a re-analysis of how the university measures depreciation in its accounting.

Through task forces and committees, Harvard re-evaluated its finances and redesigned its workforce, turning to the world’s top economists—who are also Harvard faculty—and dozens of others for suggestions.

“It’s like a gigantic battleship with a lot of barnacles that have kind of attached themselves to the ship over the years,” Jeremy Stein, a Harvard economist and former Fed governor, said of the bureaucracy.

Harvard University campus with bare trees, benches, and a building in the background.

A university committee’s report said Harvard was highly decentralized compared with its peers. Tony Luong for WSJ

Colleges and universities nationwide face a battery of financial challenges, from federal research cuts to declining student populations. Schools are trying to become more flexible as workforce and student needs grow more unpredictable, said Robert Kelchen, a professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville who specializes in education finances. Administrative and support-staff jobs are “the least painful area to cut,” he said.

Faculty aren’t expected to be included in the Harvard layoffs and role changes, which are set to take place over the next month. Harvard hasn’t said exactly how many jobs will be eliminated.

A union representing Harvard’s clerical and technical staff—including faculty assistants, IT support and finance workers—has repeatedly said Harvard doesn’t face a financial crisis, and that layoffs are unjustified and won’t reduce workload. Union organizer Carrie Barbash said Harvard should instead continue the hiring freeze imposed last spring, which has led to attrition.

“Their claims of efficiency are really disingenuous,” Barbash said. “That’s a dressing they’ve put around the cuts they want to make to justify them.”

For years, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the unit that includes the undergrad college, operated under the assumption that its budgets were essentially balanced.

But about five years ago, a university committee began to uncover how standard accounting measures were painting a misleading financial picture. The structural deficit, it found, could be traced back to an expanded campus footprint from 2000 to 2010, enhancements to undergraduate financial aid, and head-count growth among staff and faculty.

That committee’s report also said Harvard was highly decentralized compared with its peers, operating an “Every Tub on its Own Bottom” system where each subsidiary prepares its own budgets and raises its own funds.

A separate group conducted another financial review last year. Harvard’s FAS had an $8 million deficit in fiscal year 2025—but the committee said that figure is misleading because the standard depreciation formula doesn’t make sense for many of Harvard’s historic and aging buildings, which require pricey repairs and maintenance.

The depreciation cost, they approximated, is actually $400 million a year, not $138 million like standard accounting principles had suggested. They expect the endowment tax on realized returns to add another $98 million to the deficit. Those figures lead to a projected deficit of about $365 million and represent the bulk of the situation, they said.

A person walks on a sidewalk in front of Harvard University campus buildings in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Colleges and universities nationwide face a battery of financial challenges. Tony Luong for WSJ

In spring of 2025, the school created a “Task Force on Workforce Planning,” which found Harvard’s existing setup was fragmented, difficult to navigate, and caused frustrations and inefficiencies.

“It’s just inherently not structured well,” said Sean Eddy, a professor of molecular and cellular biology who was on the Workforce Planning committee.

But much of that complexity is valuable, he says. Many of the 1,500 unique job titles represent specialist roles, like a lighting technician for performing arts who may also tune the pianos. The Celtic languages and literature department, for instance, has drastically different funding and personnel needs compared with the physics department, Eddy says.

“The needs across the system are so heterogeneous that it was inherently complicated to make a design,” he said.

The group recommended adopting what they described as a federated model, with a centralized setup and more shared services. Some niche areas would still be run locally. Harvard also hired management consultant McKinsey, who helped with data analytics and brought knowledge of how similar entities operate, said Eddy.

Nearly 80 faculty and staff formed 10 design teams and spent months soliciting ideas and suggesting ways to rework the organizational structure. They shared findings with administrators, who will decide how to implement them.

Opportunities exist to streamline roles in areas like finance and HR, Eddy said. Some departments are so small they lack enough work for a full-time finance person, for instance, so they hire a generalist who splits their time between numerous tasks.

Hopi Hoekstra, the dean of FAS who spearheaded the restructuring, said adjustments will be needed after changes are implemented this summer.

“It either means cutting expenditure now or cutting expenditure in the future,” said David Laibson, a Harvard economist. “The less you cut now, the more you cut in the future.”