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Western Illinois University is laying off all nine of its library faculty members.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | LoraLiu/iStock/Getty Images | Western Illinois University
Western Illinois University is laying off all nine of its library faculty—eight of them tenured or on the tenure track—as part of wider efforts to offset a $22 million budget deficit driven by rising operational costs and a 21 percent enrollment drop since fall 2019.
While the university said in an Aug. 9 news release that it’s “made every effort to minimize the impact on students,” the planned elimination of the library faculty by May 2025 has academic librarians both inside and outside the institution questioning how WIU’s library will be able to effectively serve faculty and students in the future.
“It’s quite alarming,” said Leo Lo, president of the national Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), adding that in addition to assisting faculty in their teaching and research, librarians are especially helpful to first-generation college students finding their footing in higher education. “Without libraries to help them, it may hurt student retention” and recruitment, he said.
But Alisha Looney, a spokesperson for WIU, wrote in an email Friday that the university “will continue to have adequate coverage in the library” after the layoffs.
The university, located about 250 miles southwest of Chicago in Macomb, announced earlier this month that a total of 57 faculty—40 of them tenured or on the tenure track—and 32 staff will no longer have jobs by next May; some will be let go even sooner. An additional 35 nontenured faculty members, including one library employee, did not get their contracts renewed and vacated their positions in June, according to WIU.
“In order to address financial stability, we must recognize that our institution, like so many others across the country, must be the right size and the right shape to serve this number of students,” Kristi Mindrup, WIU’s interim president, said in a news release. “It is heartbreaking to come to this point in our institution’s path where we are at a crossroads with no choice but to make a significant financial shift for the ultimate sustainability of the institution.”
In addition to the library, numerous other departments, including kinesiology, accounting and management, lost multiple faculty positions as a result of the sweeping cuts that one faculty member described as “fiscal insanity,” according to WGEM, a Quincy-based television station.
The library, however, is the only department that was “totally obliterated,” said Hunter Dunlap, a tenured professor and systems librarian who has worked at WIU for more than 25 years. He had already signed paperwork indicating his intent to retire from the university in 2026 when he learned he’d be leaving sooner than that. He and his colleagues were given no warning about the layoffs before receiving their termination letters earlier this month, Dunlap said, which “shocked us beyond belief.”
Library Resources Already Scarce
That’s in part because WIU’s library, like many academic libraries across the nation, has been working with dwindling resources for years. Between 2013 and 2024, the number of faculty librarians on staff fell from 16 to nine, according to Dunlap. The civil service staff, semiprofessional and clerical workers who support the faculty librarians, fell from 41 to 20 employees in the same time frame.
“Because of budget cuts, there’s been some years we haven’t purchased any new books at all,” Dunlap said. “It’s been increasingly difficult to provide services. Even with that, we’ve been trying to make it work.”
Although he and his colleagues have nine months before they’ll officially be out of a job, he’s not sure how the library will function after they all leave.
“It raises very difficult, troubling questions,” Dunlap said. “We won’t be here any longer to assist our students and faculty. We’ll hand our current resources off, but we know there won’t be people to maintain our library database subscriptions, resubscribe to newspaper periodicals or select ebooks. I don’t know what will happen to the library. I don’t see how it can go forward without any librarians to procure new resources.”
But despite the layoffs, the library will still have enough resources to carry on, said Looney, the WIU spokesperson.
“While tenured/tenure-track librarians were given notices, to say that we do not have librarians continuing on the staff is inaccurate,” Looney said. She noted that the library dean will remain on staff as well as five “library associates and additional staff,” who have “completed advanced doctoral work on archives, as well as expertise on reference and database management, master’s degrees and decades of experience in their field.”
But Dunlap, who is in the process of organizing a campaign to reverse the layoffs, said that plan puts the library’s remaining civil service staff in a position to be overworked and stretched beyond their job classifications and pay structures, which may violate state law.
“There is no way on earth that Western Illinois University can provide the library services they need without their professional librarians,” he said. “It will not be possible. There will be a dramatic loss of training, expertise and decades of experience. There’s no way the university will be able to provide the services they claim they will.”
‘Library Service Nightmare’
The uncertain status of the library at the university’s Quad Cities branch campus in Moline is already giving Dunlap and others insight into what that future may look like.
Two people currently work there—one librarian and one library specialist—but both will soon lose their jobs as part of the layoffs. As of this week, the physical library building will be closed to all patrons, though the university said it is setting up an information desk in another building across campus where “students will still have access to these resources, as well as resources from our University Library system,” according to Looney, who said that means the library will remain open.
But Dunlap said the plan will create “an academic library service nightmare” that also leaves students without a proper study space.
“Top-quality library services that our tuition-paying students expect, were promised and have paid for will not be replaced in the Quad Cities by opening a makeshift ‘service desk’ in a building on the opposite side of the campus,” he said. When students request materials, “unidentified staff” will be forced to go on “forays to the closed library on the other side of the campus for retrieval,” he added. “Without a full-service reference desk staffed by professional, practicing librarians from our main campus, our students both in Macomb and the Quad Cities will be disadvantaged and harmed."
Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, a professor and coordinator for research and professional development at the library at the University of Illinois’s flagship campus in Urbana-Champaign, said that WIU’s claim that it will be able to continue offering the same level of library services after the layoffs go into effect is “specious.”
“I am not aware of any institution of equivalent size and programmatic offerings that have that staffing structure,” said Hinchliffe, who is also a past president of ACRL. “It’s not like nine [full-time-equivalent positions] worth of work is going away, and presumably all of the staff who work at the library full-time right now have jobs they need to get done. So regardless of the staffing model, there’s no way this doesn’t reduce service to the campus.”
