Brown plans to eliminate five administrative staff positions across 16 of the smallest academic departments through a consolidation plan aimed at reducing expenses, Dean of the Faculty Leah VanWey told chairs of affected departments at meetings early last week, according to three attendees.
The staffing cuts come as the University is taking steps to reduce a multi-million dollar budget deficit. Since President Trump took office, federal funding cuts have also threatened to compound the University’s financial challenges. In an August announcement, President Christina Paxson P’19 P’MD’20 wrote that due to continued financial pressure, “we anticipate that some layoffs will be necessary.”
The consolidation plan requires department chairs to form “neighborhoods” of three departments that will share administrative support staff. All 16 departments currently employ a total of 27 administrative support staff, two attendees told The Herald.
VanWey asked chairs to submit initial plans for the neighborhoods by Oct. 6 and expects the reorganization to take effect by Jan. 6, she confirmed in an email to The Herald.
At the meetings, VanWey told faculty that the administration is aiming to accomplish the reorganization without layoffs, one department chair who attended told The Herald. They, like others who spoke to The Herald, were granted anonymity for fear of retribution for discussing a private meeting.
“It’s hard to figure out how they’re going to achieve that number without letting anybody go,” the chair said.
VanWey wrote that affected staff can apply to vacant “essential” positions that are exempted from the University’s staff hiring freeze, which began in March. She noted that “multiple student affairs and administrative coordinator positions” are currently open.
According to two meeting attendees, VanWey told faculty that academic units with fewer than three administrative staff would be affected. In a separate email to The Herald, VanWey wrote that the measures are not targeted at a particular academic division and “come from the arts, humanities and social sciences.”
But the vast majority of units with fewer than three staff — like the Department of Egyptology and Assyriology, Department of Classics and the Program in Judaic Studies — fall under Brown’s humanities division.
“I worry about the future of smaller departments,” Chair of German Studies Kristina Mendicino said in an interview with The Herald.
This is not the first time Brown has attempted to consolidate administrative staff across departments. In 2021, faculty discontent led then-Provost Richard Locke P’18 to suspend a proposed “administrative support network” that proposed combining staffing for “the seven modern languages, literatures and cultures departments,” The Herald previously reported. Mendicino previously helped lead a coordinated pushback campaign that resulted in the plan’s suspension.
The move to cut staff positions and form shared administrative units has already drawn similar reactions from faculty, who, in interviews with The Herald, characterized the effort as damaging to Brown’s academic mission and that of their own departments.
“The only thing I can say with certainty right now is that we’re going to have to share staff across our ‘neighborhood,’ and that this will of course mean more work for our staff and less time available to devote strictly to us,” one department chair wrote in an email to affiliated faculty and graduate students after the meeting that was later reviewed by The Herald.
“It’s going to mean less gets done because people get spread thin,” another department chair told The Herald.
Administrative staff typically hold a wide array of responsibilities, including managing departmental finances, scheduling courses and planning events.
In an email to The Herald, VanWey wrote that the University does “not intend for this to reduce essential administrative support to departments” and anticipates that “reorganizing the work to allow specialization and management of workloads across the year will lead to increases in efficiency.”
In an interview, one department chair said that they were unsure how much money the restructuring would ultimately save.
“It would put a big stress on the staff and on the faculty,” a department chair said. “I don’t think that the money saved is worth it considering the effect on morale, on productivity.”
VanWey declined to disclose the plan’s anticipated savings in staffing expenditures, explaining the figures would reveal “sensitive salary information.”
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the Program in Judaic Studies as the Department of Judaic Studies. Brown does not host a Judaic studies department, only the Program in Judaic Studies. The Herald regrets the error.
Ethan Schenker is a university news editor covering staff and student labor. He is from Bethesda, MD, and plans to study International and Public Affairs and Economics. In his free time, he enjoys playing piano and clicking on New York Times notifications.
