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........