Harvard's Budget Leak

Since we have been blogging about UCLA budget matters on and off (including yesterday), it might be of interest to look at another university's budget. 

Harvard operates on a more decentralized basis than UCLA. And it doesn't have its own hospital (although it has a med school). Apparently, for years, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) has released aggregate budgets: Income statements (Revenues, Expenditures) and balance sheet (assets and liabilities). But after FY 2025 had passed, it didn't make a public release of its financial report. Nonetheless, it provided the FY 2025 report to selected individuals, one or more of which leaked it to the Harvard Crimson. The Harvard Crimson then published the report.* You can find the report at:

https://ia903207.us.archive.org/35/items/ucla-budget-book-v-final-feb-2026/Harvard%20Faculty%20of%20Arts%20and%20Sciences%20financial%20report%20FY2025.pdf

The income statement in the report shows a deficit for FY 2025 of $7.7 million. How bad is that? Expenditures were about $1.8 billion so the deficit was 0.4% of spending. How much did FAS have in the bank (liquid assets) to cover the deficit? The balance sheet in the report says there are "deposits with the university" of around $2 billion. So presumably, nobody is panicking. Why there was an attempt to keep the report semi-secret is an interesting question.

UCLA needs at a minimum to turn out reports such as Harvard's on a reasonably timely basis. Yes, it is more complicated at UCLA because of the health enterprise, as we noted yesterday. But it isn't impossible.

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*https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/4/13/fas-unpublished-annual-report/.