"Hot breakfasts are still the iconic issue," senior Zane Wruble, 21, says. "Perhaps we're being too entitled about it, but I do think that's what most people are still upset about."
The university froze pay for all faculty and nonunion employees for the year ended on June 30, 2009, and 556 employees took voluntary early retirement packages. Almost 275 administrative and support workers were fired.
On Hold
In Allston, a working-class neighborhood bisected by the Massachusetts Turnpike that had pinned its economic hopes on Harvard's munificence, an empty foundation sits surrounded by fencing where the science center was supposed to stand. The project, which would have brought 1,500 jobs over 50 years, is on hold indefinitely.
Harvard Management also had to tighten its belt. Mendillo fired 50 people -- a quarter of her staff -- and cut the ranks of outside fund managers by 20 percent, leaving a cadre of 150 to 200 firms that handle about two-thirds of the university's money.
She also reduced by almost half the $11 billion that her predecessors had committed to hard-to-sell investments such as those in private equity and real estate.
Harvard found itself with a cash crunch in the fall of 2008. Four years earlier, while Summers was president, the university had bought interest-rate swaps, which were contracts to protect the university from ballooning borrowing costs should rates rise from 2.25 percent, where they stood at the time.
Wrong-Way Bet
It turned out to be a wrong-way bet. After the Lehman collapse, rates plunged to zero, making the cost of the swaps soar.
Mendillo tried to sell some assets to help the school raise the $1 billion it needed to exit the swaps. She demurred when she learned the size of the losses the school would have had to take on the assets.