Harvard has been publicly claiming that its clash with the Trump administration is threatening life-saving cancer research. A more reality-based view of what actually happens at Harvard is visible in the university’s job listings, where, despite an ostensible campus-wide hiring freeze linked to federal-funding-related uncertainty and austerity, Harvard is advertising in hopes of attracting a “Lecturer in Latinx Studies” and also someone to teach podcasting to graduate students in public policy.
The position in “Latinx Studies” is housed in Harvard’s “Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights.” The faculty chair of that committee is herself a lecturer, not a tenured professor. That runs counter to the recommendation of Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, which called for uniform standards across the university’s academic programs, such as “requiring a faculty director, who is a responsible tenured member of the ladder faculty, to oversee all activities.”
The Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights also houses Harvard’s “Muslim American Studies Group,” which is planning a February 27 workshop highlighting Palestinian embroidery “as a form of cultural memory” and “intergenerational storytelling” “in collaboration with” Harvard’s Palestine Solidarity Committee, a student group that backs a boycott of Israel and that was suspended by Harvard in April 2024 after breaking rules about disruptive protests.
The job listing says the “appointment is expected to begin on July 1, 2026 and will carry a 2:2 teaching load, distributed as one lecture course and one seminar each semester, primarily for undergraduates.” It says, “We welcome expertise in some combination of the following areas: comparative ethnic studies; intersections with Indigenous and/or Black studies; colonization and decolonization; migration and diaspora studies. We are particularly interested in candidates whose courses would put multiple genres, disciplines, geographical areas, and/or historical periods in dialogue, situating ethnic, racial, and social dynamics in a transnational and global context.”
Surveys show Hispanics, by overwhelming margins, don’t use or like the term “Latinx.” A Pew Research Center survey analysis released in 2024 found “about half of the population that Latinx is meant to describe has never heard of the term.” It also said “Latinx is broadly unpopular among Latino adults who have heard of it … 75% of Latinos who have heard of the term Latinx say it should not be used to describe the Hispanic or Latino population.” A mere 4 percent of Hispanics surveyed told Pew they’d used the term to describe themselves. A 2021 Gallup survey found “most prefer ‘Hispanic’ (57%), while more than a third choose ‘Latino’ (37%). Five percent prefer ‘Latinx.’”
As Luisita Lopez Torregrosa wrote in a December 2021 NBC News piece about the term, “When I heard it, my first thought was that it wasn’t Spanish — but that it was pretentious.” The headline over the article is “Many Latinos say ‘Latinx’ offends or bothers them. Here’s why.”
Meanwhile, the Harvard Kennedy School is seeking an “adjunct lecturer in public policy.” The anticipated needs include, in communications, “podcasting,” a skill that one might expect to be taught at a community college or a more technical-oriented school like Emerson College.
Neither of the Harvard academic positions is particularly lucrative by the standards of the Boston area, which has a high cost of living thanks in part to years of “progressive” policies. The Latinx studies position, for which a Ph.D. is a basic qualification and a keyword in the job listing is “Decolonial studies,” lists a salary range of “$70,300 – $72,900.” The Harvard Kennedy School job, described as part-time, lists compensation of $11,000-$27,500 and says candidates “must hold an advanced degree (or substantial professional experience) in a relevant field and the ability to teach effectively in a policy-focused, professional school environment.” For comparison’s sake, the average teacher salary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, public schools in 2024 was $107,958, according to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. At $66,000 a year, a family of four in Massachusetts qualifies for food stamps. As another salary comparison point, Harvard is also advertising for a sous chef, which requires no Ph.D. or college degree but does demand being “able to lift (approximately 20 to 30 pounds), bend, stoop and perform other physical exertion.” That job pays between $68,100 and $111,500 a year.
As at other institutions, Harvard job listings can be posted out of a genuine need for applicants or as a pro-forma requirement when an internal hire already has been identified. The Harvard Kennedy School (where I worked from 2019 to 2023) has a small core faculty of full-time tenured professors with traditional academic backgrounds but also has employed practitioners to teach practical skills; the job listing that mentions a potential course in podcasting functions as a kind of request for proposals for people interested in teaching courses at the Kennedy School in topics including cybersecurity, criminal justice policy, and Political Campaigning and Elections.
It’s all mildly comical, but it’s also sad in a way for those cognizant of just how steep has been Harvard’s decline. That point was underscored by, of all things, the Supreme Court’s ruling this month in the tariff case. Bernard Bailyn’s work The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, published in 1967, was quoted extensively by Justice Neil Gorsuch and by Justice Clarence Thomas. Thomas, to be fair, also did mention a 2014 book by Harvard professor Eric Nelson, who is the Robert M. Beren Professor of Government; no one at Harvard seems to have paid any notice of that, and I hesitate to mention it here out of fear that it might hurt Nelson’s reputation among his colleagues. Bailyn retired from teaching at Harvard in 1993 and died in 2020. How many current Harvard professors are going to have their work posthumously cited multiple times in significant Supreme Court decisions in 2085? What are the chances that whatever work is produced by the professor of podcasting or the lecturer of Latinx Studies will be of such enduring value?
In marshaling Harvard against the Trump administration, the university’s president, Alan Garber, contended that “Research that the government has put in jeopardy includes efforts to improve the prospects of children who survive cancer, to understand at the molecular level how cancer spreads throughout the body, to predict the spread of infectious disease outbreaks, and to ease the pain of soldiers wounded on the battlefield.” He went on, “We stand for the truth that colleges and universities across the country can embrace and honor their legal obligations and best fulfill their essential role in society without improper government intrusion. That is how we achieve academic excellence, safeguard open inquiry and freedom of speech, and conduct pioneering research—and how we advance the boundless exploration that propels our nation and its people into a better future.”
The Trump administration had been pressing Harvard for government and leadership reforms, by August 2025, including “reducing the power held by students and untenured faculty; reducing the power held by faculty (whether tenured or untenured) and administrators more committed to activism than scholarship.” Anyone tempted to side with Harvard in the fight on child cancer research grounds is invited to tomorrow’s Palestinian embroidery workshop. It might be a chance to meet the people in charge of hiring the Lecturer in Latinx Studies.