Dive Brief:

• Northwestern University plans to cut about 425 staff jobs— amounting to roughly 5% of the private nonprofit’s staffing budget — senior leaders said Tuesday in a community message. 
• Nearly half of the jobs are vacant, while others will be cut through layoffs, which administrators are working to complete within 48 hours of the announcement. 
• The Illinois university is navigating a host of financial challenges, including federal research funding cuts and a potentially higher endowment tax under the Republicans’ new spending law.

Dive Insight:

In their message Tuesday, Northwestern President Michael Schill, Provost Kathleen Hagerty and Chief Financial Officer Amanda Distel described recent months as “among the most difficult in our institution’s 174-year history.”

About a month and a half ago, the same group of officials said the university faced “an increasing strain” on its finances from both looming federal policy changes and increasing expenses.

At the time, they rolled out a series of austerity measures, including a pause on employee raises, a hiring freeze for faculty and staff, health insurance changes, reduced capital spending, and lowered budgets for academic and administrative units. 

While the university has cut nonpersonnel budgets by 10%, employee costs make up 56% of Northwestern’s total annual spending. “We still are left with a budgetary gap that cannot be bridged without cutting personnel costs,” the officials said. 

The layoffs announced this week represent “a drastic step that causes pain and anxiety both for the individuals whose lives are affected, but also for our entire community, and we do not take it lightly,” they said. They also noted that schools and units were given discretion in making cuts and asked to “think strategically”  to minimize the impact to units, workers, students and the university.

Northwestern is among the prominent universities targeted by the Trump administration through probes into their responses to antisemitism on campus by the U.S. departments of Education and Health and Human Services. 

The university, however, has reported an 88% year-over-year decline in complaints of antisemitic discrimination or harassment as of November 2024.

Nonetheless, the Trump administration in April reportedly froze $790 million funds to Northwestern. Although the university at the time hadn’t received official notification of a targeted freeze from the government, it saw around 150 stop-work orders and grant terminations from federal agencies by May 1.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported via an anonymous source that the Trump administration was in talks with Northwestern and other universities about possible deals that would involve a hefty fine to resolve the investigations. The news followed Columbia University's controversial settlement with the government requiring a $221 million payment in return for the government restoring most of its research funding.

In an op-ed published in The Daily Northwestern on Tuesday, a group of Northwestern faculty described such fines as a “ransom” and called on university leadership to “resist the administration’s attack on fundamental democratic principles by refusing to 'make a deal' with the administration.”