Former Stanford FTE from ~20 years ago here.
This is nothing new. In every downturn, follow-suit like everyone else.
Stanford has more money than God ($37 gigabucks), and about as much as Harvard ($53 billion) or anyone else.
The point of "budget cuts" and "layoffs" are not to cut waste, and there is immense waste by duplication of administrative infrastructure and spendy organizational budget pyramids headed by careerist managers, but to keep donations flowing by management virtue signaling "stewardship" with an appearance of fiduciary responsibility. The MBB consultants will continue to be allowed to run roughshod in large projects with insufficient oversight and mega CIP projects will continue to be built demolishing 8-year-old gifted buildings to keep up with the university Jones'. Instead of hiring FTEs, temporary workers will be abused for countless years instead of offering them benefits (somewhere between 5 and 10 health plans for FTEs) and contractors will be hired at 2x the price.
The destruction of American institutions continues...
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Not talking about Stanford or Tech as such, but regularly I come across research and think "someone actually funded that..." i.e. The strength of some researchers is their brilliance in filling in the grant application and making their proposal seem worthwhile.
And I have met PHD students who are never going to create anything innovative.
So a sensible but not crippling tightening up would be ok by me, as a lot of research is of course excellent and you wouldn't want to destroy that.
I expect to be downvoted. :-)
Oh no dude, everyone wants nonsense research going on.
Or maybe it's 1) hard to tell what's nonsense ex ante (thus the existence of "research"), and 2) more obviously, what's going on right now is not even allegedly an effort to make research funding more sensible.
It is all very explicitly a pressure campaign to get the higher education system to conform to the current administration’s political views.
Downvoted not because I want nonsense research, but because the guy saying "you know we could use some more open space!" while an arsonist sets fire to a neighborhood is making a profoundly low-quality contribution. Doing it with smugness is downright detestable.
:-)
They were destroyed quite some time ago. You're only just noticing because the people who are squatting in them are much louder than the ones who left when they fell.
False. You just have an axe to grind.