Boston University is set to lay off about 120 people in the coming days, President Melissa Gilliam said in an email to the school’s faculty and staff Monday morning.
The cuts represent a 5% budget reduction. In addition to the approximately 120 staff positions that will be eliminated, BU will also no longer list about 120 vacancies.
https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2025/07/07/bu-announces-120-layoffs-amid-financial-difficulties/
They’ve also cut core classes and are simply making it less about education, more about DEI and brining in international students. It’s become a degree mill.
The quality of administrative staff and quality of student has degraded considerably over the past 5 years. It just keeps getting worse and worse. We should be focused on research and education vs. everything else. We used to have way less people who are highly competent. Now we have way more people because they're incomptent. Whatever is happening to BU it's not for the better.
@102 This is 100% true and continues through 2026. The real problem is now Boston Universtity has become a degree mill rather than an institution of actual learning. It's absolutely focused on the wrong things and the new strategic rollout is a reflection of that. It's losing or have lost it's real competitive edge.
120 people is fundamentally not true. They're stopping many courses and laying off or impacts a ton of part-time employees. The part-time employees make up most of their teaching staff. I'm grateful for the union, as now BU, like many other colleges can't simply take advantage for all the hardwork and dedication that the majority of the part-time staff put in. Plus, many of the full time teaching staff have very little actual industry experience, from a learning perspective it stiffles reality. Learning is much more than a Professor reading from a book, summarizing it for you, or diving deep into just their research and providing a myopic perspective on the work.
Learning is actual reality. That is what the part-times bring to the table. I'm going to imagine a strike of some sort coming soon.
This school has spent money like a drunken sailor since the new President has arrived. This action is not do to the federal spending cuts. Ask how much she has spent on consulting for herself do a job she was not ready for
Boston University is laying off 120 employees and eliminating another 120 vacant positions as it implements a 5% budget cut for the coming year, citing federal funding reductions under the Trump administration. These cuts follow similar moves at other major research institutions, including the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, which laid off 75 employees in June, and Harvard’s Kennedy School, Chan School of Public Health, and Medical School, all of which have announced layoffs in recent months. UMass Chan Medical School in Worcester also laid off or furloughed 200 employees earlier this year. BU President Melissa Gilliam attributed the layoffs to a combination of shrinking federal research support, rising inflation, declining graduate enrollment, shifting demographics, and the pressures of technological change. Massachusetts alone has lost $1.2 billion in NIH research grants, and universities are also bracing for potential declines in international student enrollment due to visa restrictions. At BU, about one-third of the student body comes from abroad. While specific departments affected at BU were not disclosed, the layoffs affect roughly 1% of its workforce. WBUR, although owned by Boston University, is editorially independent and unaffected by the staff reductions.