Antidote to layoffs at Harvard? Add to faculty course load
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HARVARD’S ROUND of budget cuts and staff reductions is drawing moans and groans from all over Harvard Yard and beyond (“Harvard workers stunned by layoffs,’’ Page A1, June 24). Your report cites an employee’s protest that the university is acting in “naked self-interest.’’ However, what else is any institution supposed to do? More to the point, one person’s self-interest is someone else’s stewardship.
What can Harvard and other colleges do? A straightforward proposition: Persuade professors to increase their teaching load. This third rail of college politics is one that must be touched. Schools with already high faculty loads - eight courses per year at places such as Bridgewater State College, where I teach - cannot extract more from faculty. However, it can be done at colleges and universities with the luxury of low faculty loads, supported as they are in large measure by high endowments. Adding one course to a four- or five-course load reduces by between 15 and 20 percent the number of professors needed to deliver the same quantity of courses with no increase in class size.
And if Harvard’s president, Drew Faust, has not yet taken the step of many other schools’ presidents, she must take that symbolic yet important personal salary cut as she doles out bitter, even if necessary, medicine across the world of Harvard.
Stephen J. Nelson, Providence
The writer is assistant professor of educational leadership at Bridgewater State and senior scholar with the Leadership Alliance at Brown University.
