From the Directors: Harvard Workforce Planning
We write to update you about the impact of the FAS Workforce Planning effort on the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS), and the novel role that IQSS will play in the new structure. We have three main points.
First: the goals are important, but the implementation has been painful, and our people have been deeply affected. The goals of the FAS Workforce Planning effort – efficiency, consistency, and sustainability – are not merely commendable; they are essential in this uncertain period for Harvard and for higher education more broadly. At the same time, aspects of the implementation have been unnecessarily difficult for many units, including IQSS, and coordination and communication between University Hall and Massachusetts Hall have not been as strong as they could be. As a University‑wide institute, we have felt these challenges acutely.
Most importantly, many of our staff – people widely recognized as among the best anywhere at the University, some who have been with us for 10, 20, or more years – have had their jobs eliminated or significantly changed. These individuals have been central to building and sustaining our intellectual community and capabilities. Social science faculty, staff, and students in every Harvard school will suffer from the damage done for some time. Even so, we remain confident that with better alignment and engagement going forward, Harvard can realize the underlying aims of this effort, and that IQSS and the University will ultimately be stronger for it.
Second: IQSS’s model and “multiplier effect” remain vital – and will be preserved in the new structure. For more than 20 years, IQSS has built infrastructure and a community that attracts the world’s best social scientists to work at unprecedented speed, scale, and levels of collaboration. We have operated a successful centralized model that achieves exactly the kinds of efficiencies, risk management, and consistency that Workforce Planning seeks. Using shared positions, common systems, and standardized processes, we have supported a large and complex portfolio of faculty, students, and staff with quantified and publicly documented gains in speed, quality, and cost effectiveness. Our community has been recognized repeatedly for these successes, including most recently by Nature, which credited IQSS for Harvard’s number‑one ranking in the social sciences. Building an enviable intellectual community has always been IQSS’s primary mission, as we explained in more detail in a published academic article; a vibrant intellectual community is the single most important asset for any center and for the University as a whole, and it will remain central as we adapt.
We have spoken at length with leaders of the Workforce Planning effort and FAS leadership and have made clear that we want to help them achieve their objectives while avoiding the loss of the “multiplier effect” we have long enabled: running standard functions (HR, finance, IT, etc.) with dual purposes – not only more efficiently, but in ways designed to build community, attract faculty, enable collaboration, and incubate larger projects in ways that do not occur elsewhere. FAS leadership has assured us they are in agreement with this shared aim. The understanding we reached is that centralized staff assigned to IQSS will be invited into the IQSS community in meaningful ways, embedded in our workflows and community as before and connected to us through clear, ongoing relationships. If this is implemented as agreed, many of our directly affected staff will continue to work closely with us in their new roles and the short‑term damage to Harvard’s social science community will be recouped. If the University’s financial position improves, we may all ultimately be better for it.
At IQSS, administrative and technical staff help incubate new ideas, lower barriers to ambitious projects and make it easy for faculty to “do something big” with us – empowering faculty vision, managing the risks of novel projects, and keeping faculty, staff, students, and institutional goals aligned. Faculty come to IQSS when they have ambitions to do something big and impactful and learn how to create larger research projects, broader research programs, centers within IQSS or elsewhere at Harvard, and even many nonprofits and for‑profits spun out of Harvard. From the faculty’s perspective, the combination of this kind of expert incubation support plus a strong, mission‑driven community is a powerful multiplier, and everyone around us benefits. To take one example, the AI Institute, the most visible project at HBS, was first incubated at IQSS. There are dozens of similar examples here and across the University. Our focus now is to work collaboratively with FAS to preserve this multiplier within the new federated structure.
Third: IQSS brings unique R&D and technical capabilities that are directly relevant to the new federated model, and we will continue to partner closely with FAS. As social and behavioral scientists, we are not just another unit in the University. We specialize in developing technology that helps people and groups, including researchers and the University’s administration, to do their jobs better, faster, and more efficiently. Over the years, IQSS has built and piloted numerous tools that have saved the University considerable resources: automated ticketing systems, chatbots, partnerships with industry to improve our operations, and automation of numerous complex processes that has greatly improved the work of our employees and collaborators – for example, transforming the Murray Research Archive, formerly flailing at Radcliffe, into the Dataverse platform that now generates enormous value for research across Harvard and beyond. This blend of methodological expertise, administrative knowhow, and technical innovation is unusual among IFIs and other parts of Harvard, and is directly relevant to the goals of the model.
We are committed to working closely with FAS leadership, as we do with the central administration and the other schools, to bring IQSS’s strengths to bear in the new federated model. Even as the administrative structure changes, our mission and strategy do not: to build and support the strongest possible community for quantitative and computational social science at Harvard. We remain grateful for your collaboration and will continue to share updates as our role within the new model takes shape.
Elizabeth Jackson, Executive Director of IQSS
Gary King, Faculty Director of IQSS, Albert J Weatherhead III University Professor
