Dive Brief:
- Harvard University has frozen faculty and staff hiring across the institution for the current semester as it navigates “substantial financial uncertainties” caused by the Trump administration.
- Senior leaders, including Harvard President Alan Garber, emphasized in a statement Monday that the hiring pause is temporary. “It is meant to preserve our financial flexibility until we better understand how changes in federal policy will take shape and can assess the scale of their impact,” they said.
- Officials with another Ivy League institution, University of Pennsylvania, also announced a hiring freeze on Monday, as well as a review of capital projects, the Daily Pennsylvanian reported.
Dive Insight:
Harvard’s move to freeze hiring shows just how deep the financial uncertainty in higher education today runs as the Trump administration looks to cancel contracts, cut research funding and threaten individual universities with massive sanctions.
Harvard is not exactly cash-strapped. It had a revenue base of $6.5 billion, an operating surplus of $45 million and an endowment valued at $53.2 billion in fiscal 2024, all of which should help it weather normal fluctuations in the sector and economy.
But the size of the potential hit from the Trump administration could be of similar scale. Federal funding for research made up 11% of Harvard’s operating budget in 2024, amounting to $686 million.
Much of that could be at risk given the administration’s attacks on higher education institutions and their funding so far during President Donald Trump’s term.
Harvard is one of 60 institutions under investigation by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights over their handling of what Education Secretary Linda McMahon called “relentless antisemitic eruptions.”
The agency sent the notices to Harvard and its peers just days after the Trump administration pulled $400 million in grants and contracts from Columbia University over what it alleged was a failure to protect Jewish students from harassment.
The administration’s financial attack on Columbia has drawn outcry from higher education groups. American Council on Education President Ted Mitchell said he worried the administration will “move on to wrongly target research at other institutions, wreaking further chaos, confusion, and negative consequences.”
Mitchell added, “None of this will do anything to protect Jewish students or meaningfully advance the goal of creating a campus free from antisemitism and other forms of hate.”
Before Harvard, other institutions have paused hiring and spending as they grapple with funding chaos under the Trump administration. That includes research giant Johns Hopkins University, which lost $800 million in federal funding just from the administration’s effort to shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The University of Notre Dame, Emory University and University of Vermont have also recently announced hiring freezes.
Many of the administration’s actions have been challenged in court. But with the ultimate outcomes uncertain in many cases, colleges are taking financial action now to protect themselves.
“We need to prepare for a wide range of financial circumstances, and strategic adjustments will take time to identify and implement,” Harvard officials said in their message to the university community. “Consequently, it is imperative to limit significant new long-term commitments that would increase our financial exposure and make further adjustments more disruptive.”
The university will revisit the hiring pause after the current semester, officials said.
Along with the freeze, Harvard is also asking heads of its schools and administrative units to “scrutinize discretionary and non-salary spending, reassess the scope and timing of capital renewal projects, and conduct a rigorous review of any new multi-year commitments,” the officials said.
