Facing Cuts Likely to Worsen Under Trump, Academic Librarians Urgently Organize

The Project 2025 blueprint for the next Trump administration sets its sights on two crucial public institutions: libraries and higher education. Librarians show up on page 5 — targeted for their support for LGBTQIA+ reading — while dismantling the Department of Education, eliminating student loan programs, and restricting what can be taught about gender, race and class feature throughout the document. But even as academic librarians live in dread of what will happen to their libraries after January 20, many of them are also already facing termination now.

In late August, just on the cusp of the new semester, librarian Hunter Dunlap learned that it would be his last.

Dunlap’s contract at Western Illinois University (WIU) — along with the contracts of all of his librarian colleagues, nine in total — is now set to terminate at the end of the 2024-25 academic year.

“It was a total surprise,” Dunlap told Truthout. “Even the dean didn’t know.” Unless the proposed cuts are reversed, that dean will be the only person left in the library with a Master’s of Library Science degree, the standard professional credential in the field. Classified staff will now be expected to perform librarian duties — research and instructional support, collection development, managing database contracts and more — alongside their current roles, with no proposal for wage increases.

“It’s an abdication of responsibility,” Dunlap said. “Come May, there will be no one to do reference, select books, teach in the classroom. None of the students, faculty, community members will have professional assistance of any kind.”

Dunlap and his colleagues are not alone in taking the brunt of the waves of budget cuts rolling through higher education due to declining public spending, the “demographic cliff,” and the reduction of a college education to a commodity that is valuable only to the extent that it directly produces a high-paying white collar job.

Last year, when West Virginia University President E. Gordon Gee eliminated 28 programs and fired 143 faculty members at West Virginia University, he also cut the library budget by 30 percent, eliminating 16 jobs while slashing collections budgets by nearly 10 percent. In the eight years since the notorious lockout at Long Island University, Brooklyn, administration has reduced library staff to just six people, including the dean. At Clarkson University, the director position sits empty following deep cuts to academic programs, including the entire School of Arts and Sciences. Citing a low number of majors, a university spokesperson said the closures were necessary because “just like businesses,” the university needed to “decide what you’re not going to do anymore in order to be able to really flourish and do the new things you want to do.” The value of the humanities is reduced to a price tag, erasing the value that such learning brings to the lives of students.

Academic libraries make soft targets for administrators who too often look at the library and see only a cost center that can be replaced by free online sources and artificial intelligence. “So much of this is due to ignorance in leadership,” says Wendi Kaspar, professor of International Affairs at Texas A&M University. Kaspar had been a librarian at A&M since 1996 but changed roles in 2021 after university administration eliminated tenure for all faculty librarians as part of a radical restructuring done in the name of austerity.

In March, the Department of Education (DOE) announced plans to eliminate data collection about academic libraries from its Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. In contemporary higher education, resources are allocated to those who can make a data-driven case for them — that’s part of what it means to run a school like a business. Removing libraries from the survey means that they can’t be counted at all. In a joint comment, several major library associations argued that such a decision would make it impossible to benchmark resources and services at the 3,700 academic libraries in the U.S. that data librarians use to argue for increased staffing and materials budgets. Such erasure will also make it impossible “to understand the cost of information over time, as well as the correlation between research expenditures and the cost of information.” The DOE still plans to eliminate academic library data beginning in 2025-26, undercutting the capacity of librarians to articulate their value in the data-driven language required by the contemporary university.

“We can’t know exactly which crises we’ll face and when, but we can absolutely be prepared for uncertain times,” said Meredith Kahn, a librarian at the University of Michigan. Along with colleagues across the Ann Arbor, Dearborn and Flint campuses, Kahn organized the first union for library workers at the university in 2022. “We know we must build strong unions with engaged members and win robust contracts in order to protect our jobs, our collections, and our mission as a public good.” It’s a message academic librarians are heeding, with successful drives at universities across the country, including the University of Washington, the Claremont Colleges, Northwestern University, and others.

The brutal backdrop makes every win precious — something Dunlap and his colleagues are working hard to deliver. They’ve got until May to push administrators to reverse library layoffs. “They’re going to have to be pressured,” Dunlap told Truthout. “There is no willingness on their part to change.”

The Illinois Federation of Teachers is providing training and infrastructural support for phone and email zaps targeting the university president, the board of trustees and the governor. Library staff are also relying on public protest, especially among a WIU community that Dunlap says was “shocked and confused” by the layoff news. “We will keep calling on them to change course, to do better, and to do right by the students,” he said. “They have until May, and we are not going away.”