CAMBRIDGE — Two sophomores. That's how many students signed up for Harvard's Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program this year. Two.
The program once had 55 concentrators. That was 2022-23. Now it's down to 22 — a 60% freefall to a 15-year low, according to the Harvard Crimson. The department has no tenured professors. Half the courses have been axed. The sophomore tutorial that used to be required? Gone. The junior tutorial for honors students? Cancelled.
Five lecturers were shown the door this year as part of a 25% slash to non-tenure-track faculty spending across Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The university denied tenure to the department's last hope — Associate Professor Durba Mitra — in June 2025 and never replaced her. What's left is one tenure-track professor and three faculty who are technically based in other departments.
A department with no tenured faculty, half its courses missing, and two incoming students isn't a department. It's a waiting room.
Harvard's $365 million problem
Harvard is bleeding money — a $365 million structural deficit that's forced cuts across the university. Programs with shrinking enrollment are getting the axe first. WGS, with 22 students and zero tenured faculty, was never going to survive that process.
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Then there's Washington. In April 2025, the Trump administration sent Harvard a demand letter tying federal funding to the dismantling of DEI programs. Whatever you think of that move, it put a target on exactly the kind of programming WGS offers. The combination of a budget crisis and a political climate hostile to gender studies has left the department squeezed from both sides.
'There is a lack of investment'
The students still in the program say Harvard is killing it through neglect, not natural causes.
"There's absolutely an interest in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies," Rosalie Couture, class of 2026, told the Crimson. "There is a lack of investment in the department from the University."
Jorden Wallican-Okyere, also class of 2026, described a department where the mood has shifted. "The culture is a little sadder than it was before budget cuts," she told the Crimson.
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They may have a point about the investment. But Harvard isn't going to pour money into a program that two sophomores chose when the university is $365 million in the hole. That's not neglect — that's triage.
The bigger picture
Harvard isn't the only place where this is happening. Gender studies programs are shrinking across the country as students pile into STEM, business, and computer science — fields that lead to jobs, not dissertations.
At $80,000 a year, a Harvard degree is the most expensive bet a 19-year-old can make. Increasingly, they're placing that bet on something with a clearer return.
Two sophomores signed up for WGS this year. The rest went somewhere else.
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