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With declining enrollment and decades of overspending, the day of reckoning for colleges and universities is starting to hit. Here’s a summary of some of news from today’s Inside Higher Ed:

• Saint Augustine’s University

Facing an existential crisis, the private HBCU in Raleigh, N.C., plans to cut half its workforce to achieve fiscal compliance with accreditation requirements, officials announced. . . Among the reductions are 67 staffers, 37 full-time faculty positions and 32 adjunct faculty jobs.

• Drexel University

The Philadelphia institution laid off 60 staff members last month due to a budget crunch caused in part by a targeted enrollment shortfall of 500 students, which added up to $22 million in lost tuition revenue, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

• University of Akron

The public research university in Ohio may cut nearly three dozen faculty members and merge some academic departments as it grapples with falling enrollment, Ideastream Public Media reported.

• University of Denver

Facing an $11 million budget deficit and allegations of financial mismanagement, the private research university cut eight staff jobs and an undisclosed number of vacancies, The Denver Post reported. University officials have attributed the budget gap to declining enrollment.

• West Virginia University

Seven more academic programs are on the way out at the state flagship, which has seen deep job and program cuts in recent years, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported. Last month the WVU Board of Governors approved a plan to eliminate five graduate and two certificate programs.

• American University

Grappling with a projected $60 million budget shortfall, the Washington, D.C.-based institution is bracing for changes—including the possibility of overhauling the School of Education.

There’s more in the IHE story, but this is enough for one day. Doesn’t look like enough administrators are being cut yet, but give it time, especially after the next Trump Administration curtails federal funding to higher education.*

In fact, universities appear to be adding still more administrators, at the moment to deal with the explosion in campus anti-Semitism. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports today that swarming administrators sometimes outnumber protestors.

With pressure intensifying to both rein in protesters and protect free speech, colleges, including Towson, Princeton University, Yale University, and the University of Texas at Austin, have set up or expanded free-speech teams, in some cases hiring full-time free-speech administrators and mediators. The goal, they say, is to protect people’s right to peacefully demonstrate by making clear what kinds of actions are and aren’t permitted. Representatives serve different roles, showing up at events to hand out flyers with the latest rules, issuing warnings, and mediating or de-escalating situations when protesters and counterprotesters clash. . .

Princeton University has a team of about 60 “free-expression facilitators” and five “free-expression coordinators,” staff members who attend campus events where things could get heated. . . Yale University also relies on free-expression facilitators.

“Free-speech administrator” has to rank as one of the all-time worst higher ed neologisms. It is also strange that institutions that like to boast of reaching “root causes” of social problems remain deliberately blind to the root cause of campus anti-Semitism—the rise of noxious ideological instruction and radical faculty the administrators have done nothing to slow or reverse.

Meanwhile, in a case of peak cluelessness, the Chronicle of Higher Education also shocked that so many college-educated young men voted for Trump. How did we fail?

Why Did More College-Educated Young Men Vote for Trump This Year?

President-elect Trump’s victory exposed a crack in a critical part of the Democratic Party’s base: young voters. Early data suggests that Vice President Kamala Harris won 18- to 29-year-olds by four points, which pales in comparison to President Biden’s 25-point margin in 2020.

One of the largest shifts occurred among young, college-educated men. In 2020, 62 percent of that group voted for President Biden. In 2024, 52 percent supported Trump — a swing of 19 percentage points. . . The change in the voting patterns of college-educated young men suggests shifting attitudes on college campuses, which tend to lean left politically, experts on youth voters told The Chronicle.

This part is especially fun:

For many young men in college, the idea that higher-education institutions have become synonymous with progressive politics resonates. Those progressive positions can feel like a pile-on to some men, Deckman said. “It gets back to messaging by the parties in some ways,” Deckman said. “That essentially, maybe there are some young men who are — the focus on women’s disadvantages, on MeToo, on toxic masculinity, is sending a signal to them that, ‘Hey, what do you mean? We’re the problem?’”

Ya think? When universities all practically scream from the rooftops, “College to white men: drop dead.”

It’s going to be fun watching higher education find new absurd heights in beclowning themselves the next four years. The ones that survive that is.

* How might this happen? The Chronicle also reports today:

Israel boycotts could jeopardize federal funding: Bipartisan legislation introduced last week would kick out of the financial-aid system any college that “participates in a nonexpressive commercial boycott of Israel,” making it prohibitively expensive for most colleges to comply with a key demand of the pro-Palestinian protest movement. It’s unlikely to pass this year but in line to be reintroduced next year, when a Republican trifecta in Washington, D.C., will have more power to pursue GOP priorities like cracking down on alleged campus antisemitism.

“Alleged” campus anti-Semitism?