On May 26th, Ed Forst announced his resignation as Executive Vice President to Harvard University. So far, no public statements have been made that say why Forst is leaving his position.

SLAM met with Ed Forst on May 20th, six days before his resignation. There have been questions about what Forst's job actually was, since the position Executive Vice President was created in 2008, and Ed Forst was the first to hold it. When SLAM met with Forst, we asked him what it meant to be Harvard's top administrator. Technically, Forst is the head of Harvard's finances, administration, and human resources. But what does this mean during a budget crisis? Forst explained that his job was to balance the priorities of Harvard's various departments, and that he accomplished this by asking questions to the various departmental heads in order to get a better sense of what could be done. We then asked what "balancing Harvard's priorities" means during a budget crisis when there are departments with competing interests. Forst reiterated that he spoke directly to the various deans of Harvard, and that he looked for efficiencies that could gained by combining services across various departments.

We thank Forst for spending an hour and fifteen minutes meeting with SLAM and fielding our questions, but we were unable to get a sense of what strategies Forst or the school held for making hard decisions about which priorities or services come first. As we've seen, the school has moved beyond the phase of asking questions and "cutting the fat" from Harvard, and will now be making cuts directly into student life, the undergraduate/graduate curriculae, core administrative tasks, and core support staff work (such as cleaning rooms and labs). On the bright side, we did get Forst to agree to push for a website that centralizes all of Harvard's budget data, similar to MIT's Institute Wide Planning website.