Despite federal pandemic aid of $69 billion, over 650,000 jobs were lost in higher education last year, amounting to 1 out of every 8 workers. This was the most extreme decline ever witnessed in the 60-plus years that the Labor Department has tracked specific industry numbers.
In typically cruel neoliberal-managerial fashion, most of those cuts were directed at the lower ends of the pay scale, affecting already vulnerable service and support workers and adjunct professors, rather than tenured or tenure-track faculty and administrators. Some cuts were even deeper. In July 2020, the University of Akron decided to eliminate dozens of tenured (and unionized) faculty positions, pleading “catastrophic circumstances.” That October, Ithaca College announced it was “right-sizing” its faculty by eliminating 130 of its 547 teaching positions.
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