April 14, 2009

To President Faust and Members of the Harvard Corporation:

We write to you as members of the Harvard community because we are concerned with our University’s response to the economic crisis. We recognize that Harvard confronts a difficult challenge with a significant drop in the endowment announced in November 2008. However, Harvard remains the wealthiest university and one of the wealthiest non-profit organizations in the world. In this difficult moment, Harvard faces a choice: we can choose either to use our wealth in order to strengthen our community—students, faculty, and workers together—or to allow greed and fear to divide us and erode our institution of higher learning. We call upon Harvard in these times to act, not out of a logic of fear, but out of a logic of courage and creativity. In recent months, it appears that Harvard is taking the former path by laying off workers and generating an atmosphere of divisiveness. We reject this approach. Accordingly, we demand that the University suspends layoffs and recalls all workers, full-time and part-time, who have been fired since October 2008.

We have watched with dismay as Harvard has responded to this economic crisis very differently than many peer institutions. Universities such as Stanford have committed to partial pay-cuts among the highest paid administrators. MIT has engaged the university community more openly and broadly through a series of town hall meetings. We refuse to accept that the wealthiest university in the world must lay off workers when institutions of far lesser means are able to navigate the economic crisis with greater justice and fairness.

First, Harvard has not demonstrated—through transparent, full disclosure of financial information—why job cuts “cannot be averted now.” Second, even if the need for further budgetary cuts were to be transparently demonstrated, the moral logic that should animate a non-profit institution whose motto is “Truth” can never justify forcing its lowest paid workers to pay for a crisis that confronts us all.

Because this is a crisis that involves the entire Harvard community, we must be involved in formulating a comprehensive response. This response must be grounded in an ethos of shared sacrifice and democratic participation. We insist that this process be opened to the community, and thus request a meeting with the President, the Corporation, University administrators, members of the Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM), and other relevant groups in order to begin working together on creative and alternative solutions. We hope to meet immediately with workers, and certainly no later than April 30, 2009.

Sincerely,

The Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM)

slam@hcs.harvard.edu