On June 18, the University released a statement “to update staff and faculty about the profound financial challenges facing the university.” Though much of the faculty had already left campus by that time to pursue their summer research and scholarship, the message to the ‘community’ is worth lingering over. I use single quotation marks because the message that followed belied any real sense of community:
“We will begin a comprehensive review of programs and headcount across the university.”
Headcount. How coldly corporate can a message be? What happens to excess heads? They roll.
In case the euphemism wasn’t brutal enough the first time comes this sentence: “While we will make every effort to downsize by attrition, we anticipate involuntary reductions in headcount across the university.” Involuntary reductions in headcount. Can you say decapitation? How much more inhumane and vicious can language be? Whose heads do Kotlikoff et al. mean?
Then comes the coup de grâce: “It is important that every member of this community understands…”
So to those of you who will be decapitated, we expect you to recognize the greater good you will serve by having your heads severed. Be grateful, they say. Even as your future is reduced to a cost-saving measure.
Yes, Cornell is responding to an unprecedented attack on education. Yes, Trump means to destroy higher education, weaponizing federal funding and launching a coordinated assault on our universities. But why won’t the University name that plainly?
Why suggest, as if it happened with no oversight, “[s]ince June 2021, Cornell’s workforce has grown by more than 15% — greatly outpacing our revenue” as if expansion happened by accident? Who approved the hires? Who grew the programs? Who greenlit the spending? Who was minding the coffers while the hiring happened? If they made mistakes in overestimating their decisions to create new programs, own up to it.
But do not pretend the consequences now are natural, neutral or inevitable.
The Trump administration wants to destroy institutions like Cornell. And Cornell has enabled its own weakening. It has prioritized donor satisfaction and endowment growth over transparency, labor equity and academic mission.
If Cornell can’t be honest about how their own rapacious behavior landed them exactly here — fine. But don’t target your “austerity” axes — and don’t get me started on how politically loaded the word austerity is — at the hard-working, underpaid, underappreciated, under resourced human beings who have dutifully worked to keep the lights on, the water running, the students fed, the grounds and hallways clean. The people — the heads — upon whom austerity axes always fall first.
You are safe in your multi-million dollar salaried life-styles. The person cleaning your bathroom isn’t.
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David N. DeVries is the retired Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education in the College of Arts and Sciences. He continues to teach with the Cornell Prison Education Program. He can be reached at dd75@cornell.edu.
