After its endowment plunged by 22%  (and is expected to he down by more than 30% by the end of the fiscal year), Harvard is taking action to control its budget.  And, professor salaries are a big part of its budget.  Yesterday, it announced that it will temporarily discontinue searching for tenure-track professors.  As of Monday, 35 of the 50 searches for faculty have been discontinued indefinitely.   It will also freeze salaries for all 720 members of its faculty and will institute a hiring freeze for all nonfaculty staff.

Arts and Sciences Faculty will cute between $105 and $125 million of its yearly budget (which is currently at $1.2 billion).  Still, things are better at Harvard than they are at Brandies where professors have been asked to voluntarily take a 1% salary cut.

Additional cuts in personnel may be coming.  This is bad news for Massachusetts as Harvard is the state’s largest employer.

Source: Boston Globe