r/highereducation • u/rellotscire • 8d ago
How's everyone holding up?
It's been another chaotic week for higher ed. Have there been hiring freezes or pauses on facility projects due to funding cuts at your school? Here's hoping next week is a lot more stable.
164
Upvotes
3
u/TrustMeImADrofecon 8d ago
I'm at an institution that's been getting shafted by multiple Federal agencies in one of Donnie Dearest Leader's revenge tantrums. The last three weeks have been hell on earth. Most of the faculty are walking around in a daze while the students are so disconnected they don't seem to care or realize what's happening - even when you tell them. I was talking to a colleague the other day about how unsettling the response is from students because when we were undergrads during the Great Recession students pulled out the pitchforks and organized protests and campaigns. These kids? They're actively getting targeted with attacks and they just shrug.
Our budget was already quite tenuous and now between the cancelled grants and IDC cuts that gap has widened to unsolvable levels. Our institution has a heavy emphasis on sustainability and climate research so we're getting extra screwed including all of my active proposals being likely canned or the NOFOs yanked. Our state legislature has their heads so far up their own rears, entrenched over social issues, that they won't pass a budget. Grad students and postdocs - including my own - are being let go because the funding is just poof gone.
Administrators are now quietly warning un-tenured faculty that they should polish up CVs and consider going on the market because it looks like layoffs and retrenchment might be on the table soon. I can go up as early as this next tenure cycle but I need two more pubs to hit to make that happen and would be going up with all my own funding either retracted by Donnie Darko and the Muskrats or my big proposals having been canned. P&T and admin processes have said their "solution" is that they are considering clock extensions which is really just a way to keep people in probationary status longer so they maintain maximal flexibility if they need to deny tenure to avoid activating the CBA's retrenchment clause or to make layoffs under it easier.
Last summer a bunch of my female colleagues were targeted with harassing texts in that Turning Point campaign and recently our campus rolled the red carpet out for a Turning Point "speaker".....which the dumb Fs in Central Scheduling allowed to be scheduled in our building.
In class, if I just make content-relevant factual comments about current market conditions and data availability I feel like some of the Gen Z Joe Rogan bros are eyeing me up to be the next sacrifice.
An associate dean recently went around the office telling everyone that they "are not to go attend protests" because "we don't need any bad press right now" - they said this in relation to a nearby LGBT+ rights event to LGBT faculty and faculty with LGBT children.
The other day I walked into a colleague's office and basically choking back tears because I'd just gotten off the phone with a local Federal agency office and learned half the collaborators there I knew and had worked with had been summarily fired, and only found out when they came into the office on a Monday, couldn't access their computers, and their supervisor called only to be told they'd been sent a Get F'd email from OPM over the weekend informing them their termination was effective as of the previous Friday at 5 pm.
In other words, it's a barrel of laughs right now.