On July 29th, I was enjoying a week of vacation, spending time with my spouse’s family in South Dakota. I got an out-of-the-blue text message asking me to join a meeting with my library’s director and human resources. Having been in this situation before, I knew what was coming—I was being laid off.
The Story Behind the Layoffs
More than 200 of my coworkers at Northwestern University were laid off that day. Ten percent of my library’s staff were laid off. In April, the Trump administration froze $790 million in federal grants to Northwestern, because they claim Northwestern violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act in not providing a harassment-free environment for Jewish students. To be clear, the Trump administration doesn’t care about Jewish students—if they did, they wouldn’t have appointed people who spout antisemitic rhetoric to positions within the administration.
The White House continues to extort universities by freezing their federal funding and demanding campus reforms including government oversight of academic decisions and punishing fines. Weaponizing claims of antisemitism by universities with prominent protests over the Gaza genocide is a convenient tool for an administration that seeks to undermine academia. At the same time, it hurts the Jewish community by exploiting their very legitimate concerns about rising antisemitism from the right.
John Oliver’s most recent episode of Last Week Tonight, “Trump vs. Higher Education,” does a good job of laying out the issues, as well as correctly identifying Columbia as “the little bitch university” for immediately giving into the Trump administration’s demands (which did not stop additional demands for more government control over admissions and academic departments). Northwestern didn’t cave in quite the same way, but did take the administration’s claims of antisemitism at face value, implementing new policies (such as requiring students to remove face masks when requested) and new mandatory antisemitism training.
Northwestern’s federal funding is still frozen. Is it reasonable to think that my layoff is part of standing up to the administration? I’d like to think it means something, instead of just being arbitrarily cruel. But Northwestern certainly isn’t framing it that way, saying that the layoffs are “in response to more than just the federal research funding freeze. These include rapidly rising healthcare expenses, litigation, labor contracts, employee benefits, compliance requirements and a suite of federal changes, such as potential constraints on our ability to enroll international students, as well as likely reductions in research Facilities and Administration reimbursements and in overall federal research funding.”
Once Again, Into the Breach
This is my third time being laid off. The first was in 2008, while I was working for Bank of America, as a result of the 2008 financial crisis. My department’s last six months included training our replacements in India. In October 2020, I was laid off from OCLC, due to their fears about the impacts of COVID on higher education (their largest clients). I’d tell you more about how terrible that situation was, but OCLC required me to sign a non-disparagement contract in order to get any severance pay. In 2023, the National Labor Relations Board ruled the inclusion of non-disparagement clauses in severance agreements was no longer permitted, but who knows what will change under this administration.
Now, in 2025, I’ve been laid off again. I’m devastated, of course. I liked my job, and I was good at it, with three years of “excelling” performance reviews. I received four weeks of severance pay, and I’m adjuncting, so I have a little money coming in (about $400 a week). Unemployment will supplement that for a while, with an extra $200 a week. I’ll get a deferment on my student loans, which, as I shared in my last post, were about to rise to a monthly payment of $1,242, but my progress towards loan forgiveness now grinds to a halt, again. And the job search begins anew.
I still think of myself as one of the lucky ones, since I’m married and I’ll be able to join my spouse’s insurance after my Northwestern insurance runs out this month. I know that I’m lucky to have had a decade to build my experience; I don’t envy the new MLIS graduates who are looking for increasingly harder-to-find jobs in higher education. I’m extremely grateful for the support of many people in the profession.
But I have to admit—I’m afraid. And I wish this suffering meant something, other than just being the latest in a series of things getting worse, for me and for everyone I care about.
I’m so sorry this happened to you. Reading this brought back my own memories of being an employee at Northwestern and made me angry all over again about what’s happening to higher education. You’re right to see this as part of something bigger – the way the administration is weaponizing antisemitism claims to gut universities, the impossible position institutions are being put in. And you’re also right that it still feels arbitrary and cruel on a personal level, especially when you were excelling at work you genuinely cared about.
It’s challenging to want your suffering to mean something – to be part of a principled stand rather than just another cut in a spreadsheet. The fact that Northwestern won’t even frame it that way has to make it worse.
I don’t have answers, but I wanted you to know that someone else who knows Northwestern sees both what this means in the bigger picture and what it means for you personally. Both of those things are true, and both matter.