More than 100 Harvard researchers received termination notices for federally funded research projects on Thursday, as sweeping cuts to the majority of Harvard’s federal grants begin taking effect across the University’s labs.
The notices, delivered via email from Harvard’s Grants Management Application Suite, informed recipients that their projects had been terminated “per notice from the federal funding agency” and contained a list of terminated grants.
“You are receiving this e-mail because one (or more) of your projects have been terminated,” the emails read.
Harvard Assistant Vice President for Sponsored Programs Kelly Morrison and Chief Research Compliance Officer Ara Tahmassian had warned the researchers in a separate Wednesday email that the majority of Harvard’s awards from federal agencies were terminated.
“The University has received letters from most federal agencies indicating that the majority of our active, direct federal grants have been terminated,” they wrote to recipients.
Some of the terminated grants exceeded $1 million, funding entire research operations, including salaries for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and lab technicians.
You’re acting as if Harvard has no control over the way they utilize the endowment, and that’s just not true. Of course they want to manage it so that they are only drawing from a portion of the gains rather than actually spending it down. Of course some percentage of funds are earmarked for specific purposes like new buildings, endowed professorships, and the like.
None of this means that Harvard cannot make the strategic decision to dip heavily into the endowment to maintain researchers’ livelihoods while their fight moves through the courts. Arguably it’s the fiscally-responsible thing to do, because many of the affected researchers are going to be losing work in progress that may have to be replicated if they are ever rehired, and some portion of those laid off are going to move on to other things, impacting Harvard’s research capacity and their reputation as a desirable, high-status employer in the sciences. One would have hoped that they picked this fight with the intention of winning it, and failing to tap the endowment as bridge funding while the legal challenges play out risks making it something of a Pyrrhic victory.
Posted to the wrong comment, whoops
They’re not doing research for Harvard, they’re doing science research for the public which was competitively assessed and awarded.
That’s how the US has chosen to fund science research for over 50 years. It was considered a public good and has easily been one of best public investments that we’ve made during the period.
America has been at the pinnacle of science, medicine and education largely through this partnership with Universities. trump and company are pissing that legacy away in an effort to destroy higher education in the US, which they believe to be an impediment to them instituting authoritarian rule.
They’re happy to loot the country and burn it to the ground so long as they can rule over the ashes.
“Some percentage” is a gross understatement:
"In addition, many donors also designate a specific purpose for which their fund can be spent. For Harvard, over 80 percent of endowed funds are subject to these restrictions. Contributions may be given in support of a specific School, program, or activity, and can only be used for those purposes. " (emphasis mine)
It would be financially ruinous to do so. That endowment spending would be gone. Just gone. You would get short-term payouts but you would fuck University funding for decades. And we’re talking core funding which can’t be paid back by the grants that would possibly be gotten in the future since those grants pay for the research. Even if they got the grants back that were cancelled it wouldn’t be able to re-supply the endowment.
Run the numbers. 20% of Harvard’s ~$53 billion endowment is more than $10 billion that they can spend, no strings attached. Harvard receives just shy of $500 million per year in NIH grants. They could fund the next four years of their scientific research completely out of pocket, and it would only cost 4% of the endowment, and leave the overwhelming majority of their unencumbered funds intact. Hell, 4% isn’t even half of the endowment’s growth rate last year — they could do this indefinitely to make a point and still grow the endowment. Is reducing their annual net profit by ~10% small beans? No, but it’s entirely doable and wouldn’t create any catastrophic impacts on the rest of the of the institution.
For what it’s worth I am in regular contact with another R1 institution that previously received significantly more federal research grant funding than Harvard, with an endowment a fraction of the size. To my knowledge they’ve frozen new hiring and are planning to tighten their belts in terms of capital expenditure, but they have not moved to cut researchers yet. This feels like a short-sighted move on Harvard’s part, and I rather suspect that they’re taking the opportunity to cut perceived chaff more than anything else.
Yes? But only once. What do they do next year when they need to fund the university?
Did you read past my first sentence? They can replace the entirety of the research grant funding they receive from the government out of pocket and it would barely even dent the rate of growth of the endowment. You think you’re making a clever point here and you’re just not.
Disagree. I doubt your janky math .So what conspiracy theory do you have for why they aren’t?
Dude… my “janky math” is that 500,000,000 / 53,000,000,000 is ~0.01, or 1% versus the ~9.5% ROI they received on donations and investments last year. You can check that with a calculator app in about ten seconds if you doubt me, and my “conspiracy theory,” which you would have found in the post directly above if you bothered to actually read it, is that Harvard is making the shortsighted decision to hoard its cash and use the cuts as an excuse to cut perceived low-performing lab teams, rather than make a relatively minor outlay to keep everyone on, and make an implicit statement about the importance of research and the weakness of Trump’s hand here.