Yesterday, every single staff person in my department (and across our entire College of Letters, Arts, & Sciences) got fired. That includes our office managers, our program coordinators, our staff student advisors, and our lab technicians. In total, 162 people had their positions eliminated. The college is being “restructured” to shrink staff, which means that folks can apply for versions of their old jobs; in total, 115 people will be re-hired, and almost 50 people will see their jobs disappear permanently. Those that do get re-hired might end up working for different units and in different roles.

The folks who lost jobs are not fancy ivory tower types or woke scolds or pink-haired Marxists or whatever image of academics the media has planted in our collective head. They are regular hard-working people, many with years of loyal service to the university, who fix the broken thermostats in the classroom and track enrollment in our classes and assign teaching assistants and refill the department coffee pot and sort the mail and schedule the classroom spaces and track the students’ course requirements and clean the beakers and Bunsen burners and call the elevator repair guy and painstakingly check all the files in our faculty’s tenure dossiers and manage our department budgets and set up our colloquia and generally herd the pack of unruly cats that constitute our professoriate. They form the connective tissue that makes the university run.

Our university is not the only one hurting, forced to lay off long-serving employees, cancel programs, and eliminate departments. Largely, this is happening because of the tremendous financial uncertainty imposed by the Trump administration’s war on higher education: cancelling research grants, capping overhead costs, trying to price-fix our tuition, cutting student aid and borrowing, capping the number of international students we can admit and blocking their visas. We can argue on the merits of any of these moves, but a thoughtful and constructive administration would announce changes in advance and phase them in gradually to minimize the impact on schools. Instead, we’ve had a chaotic, seemingly arbitrary barrage of executive orders, some hollow threats, others real, making it impossible for anyone to plan or anticipate next year’s financial picture.

What’s frustrating is that this is all totally self-imposed by MAGA’s culture war vendetta against universities. Investing in our research universities is cost-effective: they return benefits to the economy and are engines of innovation. Universities are also major job providers; not just faculty jobs but the rank-and-file staff jobs like the ones that were just eliminated. The administration’s actions are needlessly costing hard-working Americans their jobs.

Our university also had to implement hiring freezes and layoffs in the wake of the 2008 recession and the pandemic, but those were driven by major economic crises. This is different. It’s driven by pique, vengeance, and score-settling against an imaginary cultural enemy that Trump enjoys scapegoating in order to fire up his base. But the people getting caught in the crossfire are real people with families. I’ve posted before about my student whose training grant, his key source of summer funding, got canceled by this administration just weeks before the summer started, forcing him to scramble to pay his rent. This is a stupid, petty, counter-productive self-own by a leadership trying to destroy the institutions that actually make America great.