A Central New York college is preparing layoffs as it faces “profound financial challenges.”
Cornell University announced Wednesday that it is undergoing a “comprehensive review of programs and headcount across the university,” suggesting jobs will be cut after President Donald Trump and his administration froze $1 billion in federal funding and grant money. The Ithaca-based Ivy League school said it’s been using “institutional resources to try to plug these funding holes in the short term,” but needs to reduce costs and undergo permanent operating changes.
Initial “financial austerity” changes include restricting hiring on all campuses for the 2025-2026 academic year; restricting discretionary expenditures include travel, food and purchasing; and reviewing research programs to make them more cost effective and efficient.
“The spring semester was unlike anything ever seen in higher education, with hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research contracts at Cornell terminated or frozen, and serious threats to future research funding, federal financial aid, medical reimbursement, and research cost recovery, along with an anticipated tax on our endowment income, and rapidly escalating legal expenses,” Cornell President Michael I. Kotlikoff said in a letter co-signed by Provost Kavita Bala, Provost for Medical Affairs Robert A. Harrington, and Executive Vice President and CFO Chris Cowen.
“These acute funding challenges come as Cornell has experienced a marked and unsustainable increase in expenses due to inflation, the expansion of our workforce, and other cost pressures,” the letter continued. “While we are confident that we will weather this crisis, we will only do so by working together to make the difficult, but necessary, changes to ensure that Cornell will continue ‘to do the greatest good’ for many years to come.”
Cornell has mounted several legal challenges to the Trump administration’s cuts, including lawsuits over cuts to research grants from the Department of Education and the National Institutes of Health. The Associated Press reports similar funding freezes have been issued at Columbia University, Harvard University, Northwestern University and other schools since Trump began his second presidential term.
According to WSKG, the university is the largest employer in Tompkins County with more than 11,000 employees currently.