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As a communications manager on a human relations team at Stanford University, Matt Nazario-Miller helped review a script that would be read to staff members who were to be laid off by the university.
On July 30, Nazario-Miller listened as his supervisor read him the exact script he helped review, a move he described as a “slap in the face.” Nazario-Miller was being laid off, effective Oct. 1.
Nazario-Miller was one of 363 staff members whom Stanford laid off over the summer, citing a “challenging fiscal environment shaped in large part by federal policy changes affecting higher education.” The workforce reduction came after a June announcement that called for a $140 million reduction to the university’s general fund ahead of the 2025-2026 school year and a reduction in staff positions. The university also implemented a staff hiring freeze in February.
In July, federal lawmakers raised the endowment tax on institutions with large endowments like Stanford from 1.4% to 8% as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill, which President Donald Trump signed on July 4. The increased tax will result in Stanford paying more than $1 billion in federal taxes in the next five years instead of $175 million, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
In fiscal year 2025, which ended Aug. 31, the endowment disbursed $1.9 billion to support academic programs, offer financial aid and enable educational goals, the university reported. When asked whether the university considered using endowment funds to avoid layoffs, Stanford’s Director of Media Relations Luisa Rapport pointed this publication to previous communications from the university which state that 75% of endowment funds can be used only for purposes designated by the donors.
“While the remaining funds support general university operations, they are designed to support the university over the long term,” says a Sept. 8 Stanford Report. “The endowment tax will make it harder for the endowment payout to keep up with inflation, and removing too much from the funds now would make it difficult to pay expenses that are covered annually by endowment payout down the road.”
‘Staff are seen to be, in some ways, second rate citizens,’
former stanford employee who has been laid off
Rapport noted that staff were given at least 60 days of paid notice prior to their final day, generally on Oct. 1, meaning that many affected staff were informed of their layoff at the end of July. Rapport also said that eligible employees received severance pay based on their years of service to the university, contributions to their benefits premiums for three months, and outplacement assistance that helps departing employees find new opportunities.
With approximately 18,000 faculty and staff, around 2% of Stanford’s workforce was laid off. Rapport declined to specify how the university leadership determined which staff members would be impacted. No faculty members were laid off.
Nazario-Miller is one of five former Stanford University staff members who spoke to this publication in the aftermath of getting laid off. The staff members spoke about what they experienced, how they are faring, and what they think the lay-offs mean for the future of Stanford.
After the news, Nazario-Miller has struggled to understand what the decision means for him and for the future of higher education. Nazario-Miller obtained his master’s in education and has worked in K-12 systems or higher education for his entire career.
“The decision is reinforcing for me what I’ve always known to be true: that higher ed has a lot of work to do,” Nazario-Miller said. “Education is about learning. Education is about community. I think we have lost our way in our capitalistic society in considering education as a form of business and considering only the bottom line.”
‘Like getting kicked out of the family’
Colleagues Sarah Meyer Tapia and Diane Friedlaender were the director and associate director, respectively, of Stanford Living Education. Known as SLED, the program offered around 60 courses across three branches of curriculum that focused on student well-being. Wellness offered courses on topics such as financial literacy, nutrition, sleep, and relationships. LifeWorks integrated the arts with contemplative practices for well-being. LEAD, one of the program’s branches of curriculum, focused on students’ leadership and change-making skills. In total, the program served around 1,000 students annually, Friedlaender said.
“It’s felt like the most purposeful work I’ve ever done,” said Meyer Tapia, who had worked at Stanford for 13 years.
‘It almost feels like getting kicked out of the family,’
sarah meyer tapia, former director of the ‘sled’ program
When Friedlaender received a calendar invite from Jim Jacobs, the executive director of Vaden Health Services and the programmatic supervisor to SLED, at the end of July, she suspected what was about to happen. Jacobs read from a script and told Friedlaender that her position had been eliminated. The decision was not performance related, she was told, but related to budget concerns.
After hearing the spring announcements from the university’s leadership about pending staff layoffs, the SLED staff had considered they would have to make reductions to their budget. Still, the elimination of SLED and the layoff of the entire four-person team that runs the program came as a shock to both Meyer Tapia and Friedlaender. Friedlaender was the first of her four colleagues to hear the news, a sequence that Meyer Tapia, as director of the program, found “painful.”
Friedlaender, a Stanford staff member for 21 years, said the news was “personally devastating.” But more than that, Friedlaender said she felt crushed for her students (See sidebar).
“I realized how much being there has become part of my identity,” Friedlaender said. “It’s just a part of the fabric of my life. That’s where I spend my time.”
For Meyer Tapia, the news was also devastating. On the very same day that she was laid off from her position as director of SLED, her husband, a staff member in the athletic department who worked at Stanford for 18 years, also learned he would be laid off, meaning that both income earners were unemployed overnight. Meyer Tapia also noted the benefits that would be foregone. Meyer Tapia’s son will apply for colleges soon, but if she is not a Stanford employee, he will be ineligible for the Stanford tuition benefits available to staff. The news has also left an emotional impact.
“It almost feels like getting kicked out of the family,” she said.
While the grief of the lost job hits both Friedlaender and Meyer Tapia in waves, both staff members said their work isn’t over. The pair are in communication with Stanford donors and academic programs to find a new home for SLED on campus. Meanwhile, Friedlaender is doing consulting work and may offer workshops, courses and coaching to various institutional entities. With hopes of rehoming SLED in some capacity at Stanford, she is not looking for jobs elsewhere.
Meyer Tapia has a consulting business outside of Stanford and three roles on campus leading various curricula for Stanford Lifestyle Medicine, the Distinguished Careers Institute, and Healthy Living workshops for faculty and staff. Meyer Tapia said she prefers not to dwell on the past, but on what she and Friedlaender can build from the ashes of the former program.
“I don’t know that it’s useful spending all of our energy ranting and raving,” she said. “So how are we going to … create something in the world that is beautiful and serves our community?”
They aren’t the only affected Stanford employees who are responding to the layoffs by building their networks and redoubling their efforts to support higher education. Days after the layoff news, Nazario-Miller began organizing a Higher Ed Staff Hope Collective of staff in higher education who are experiencing job loss or who are worried about the future of higher education.
The Collective meets bi-weekly, and around 40 people from institutions such as Stanford and the University of Southern California – who have laid off at least 700 staff in similar budget reduction efforts – are regularly attending the virtual events and workshops that the Collective hosts.
The Collective has given Nazario-Miller a meaningful community to think about larger questions, and he said some members of the collective are using Stanford’s severance pay to catalyze entrepreneurial endeavors.
Nazario-Miller is also actively interviewing for full-time positions with benefits. In the meantime, he’s starting a contract role in October as the employee onboarding and learning specialist for LinkedIn – his first foray into an industry outside of education.
“Shattering” news
Another staff member was laid off from a role that primarily supported students and researchers working in history and the digital humanities. The staff member is searching for new opportunities in the area, and was granted anonymity so she could speak candidly for this story.
The staff member said she cared deeply about her work. When her boss informed her of the layoff, her first question was whether she could complete some of the projects she was working on. Her boss told her that she couldn’t; the termination was effective immediately on July 29, when she was informed of the decision, and she had to pass off the projects.
former stanford employee, reflecting on being laid off
‘Honestly, it’s been really shattering. I’ve felt like I’ve been in the twilight zone.’
The staff member became emotional describing the impact the layoff has had for her.
“After years of hearing you were a top performer and getting stellar reviews and putting your all into something … someone looked at a list of people and decided that you didn’t matter to the institution enough to be retained,” she said. “Honestly, it’s been really shattering. I’ve felt like I’ve been in the twilight zone.”
In the aftermath of the news, she has struggled to begin the job hunt because of the emotional toll of being laid off. While Stanford provided a resume writer to help polish her application materials for future positions, she said the resume writer did not understand her work and the resume, which seemed to her AI-generated, was unusable. In the meantime, she is rebuilding her resiliency and taking advantage of the counseling services Stanford provided to impacted employees.
“I have been focusing on family and getting things done around the house, but it’s difficult because I’m watching my bank account get smaller while I’m doing that,” she said, adding that she plans to begin searching for a job once she’s rebounded psychologically.
The layoffs have left the staff member feeling unsettled about the world and disappointed that Stanford didn’t place more value on the work of the 363 terminated staff members. She also worries about how her absence will impact her team’s work and what it means that her voice will be missing. She said she often encouraged her team to consider the longevity of a project or think about how their work contributed to the community. More broadly, she wonders about the quality of the training of the next generation of students and leaders.
“The university is still able to function and perform their goal, their mission of education,” she said. “But … are we asking the philosophical questions about that mission and how we can empower the next generation to be better thinkers with strong research skills and ready to make important contributions to humanity as a whole?”
Mission and values
Since the university’s administration of budget cuts in the spring, one staff member had been considering how to continue their office’s operations with less resources. When the staff member, who was the director of a student-facing office, learned they were being laid off, the news came as a shock. The staff member was granted anonymity so they could speak candidly as they pursue new job opportunities in higher education.
After being laid off, the staff member worried about securing a livelihood in a tough job market in higher education that has been racked by workforce reductions amid changes in federal policy. More than that, though, they worried about the impact the layoffs would have on students, especially international students, and the other campus offices that serve students. (See sidebar).
The layoffs have left this staff member grappling with a range of questions, including what Stanford represents and what a university ought to value. Stanford, the staff member said, serves as a nexus between academic achievement and private and corporate interests. In a system of academic capitalism, knowledge is the capital that Stanford produces. And faculty, not staff, are seen as the personnel most central to the most important product of academic capitalism, the staff member said.
“Staff are seen to be, in some ways, second-rate citizens,” the staff member said. “They’re seen as expendable.”
Going forward, the staff member is following some job leads in higher education. They said they plan to be more discerning in choosing an institution that aligns with their values. In their next role, they will pay attention to the communications of the institution’s leadership.
The staff member still finds hope in being an educator, but noted that higher educators will grapple with many of these questions in the years to come. They also noted that the public is a stakeholder of the university as a consumer of higher education and the recipient of the public good that the university creates. Community members, the staff member said, can put “healthy pressure” on institutional leadership to carefully consider and communicate their mission to the public.
“Are the leaders going to listen to the range of their constituents and their stakeholders, not just a small portion of them, not just the most powerful of them?” the staff member said.
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The new endowment tax is 8%. But 8% of what? The endowment? Appreciation of the endowment? Dividends from endowment investments? Net investment income?