Early last May, I attended a town-hall meeting of undergraduates at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The topic that evening: cost-cutting. As I settled into my chair, in Boylston Hall, student activists, members of the “Student Labor Action Movement,” were making their way through the auditorium, handing out flyers. “Rethink. Resist,” urged the bold black letters. It was a call to action. “no layoffs!” At the top of the printed page was Harvard’s historic coat of arms: three small open books. Cleverly, the university’s Latin motto—normally inscribed on the books as “ve-ri-tas“—had been replaced with a near anagram, “av-ar-ice.”

[#image: /photos/54cbf3e1fde9250a6c402f84]|||How did we get into this mess? Visit our archive “Charting the Road to Ruin.” Illustration by Edward Sorel.|||

Ignoring the agitators as best he could, Michael Smith, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard’s biggest division, called the meeting to order. Sitting casually on a desk, wearing jeans and a short-sleeved polo shirt, Smith, a professor of engineering and applied sciences, and a former competitive swimmer, looked more like an athlete than an administrator. He got straight to the point: his division—which includes Harvard College, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences—was facing a budget deficit of $220 million.

That’s a huge sum: $220 million! Nearly 20 percent of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ current budget had to be cut. “That frightens me,” Smith said forthrightly. “It should frighten you. We obviously can’t sit around and do nothing. We’ve got to find a way to try and get the income back in alignment with the expenses.”

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