People's Alliance Calls for Fairer Budget Cuts at Duke

Town-Gown Unity Against Trump Attacks

The People’s Alliance joins our allies in the Durham community in urging the Duke administration to pursue a budget adjustment process that is fair, transparent, and minimizes harm to Durham’s most vulnerable residents, who should not be asked to shoulder the heaviest weight of Donald Trump’s unconstitutional and authoritarian attacks on higher education.

We recognize that Trump’s ongoing assault on our nation’s universities has jeopardized at least $500 million in federal grants, contracts, and other funding sources at Duke. Hundreds of millions of dollars in existing Duke research grants have already been cut, frozen, or eliminated. Taken together, Duke is facing a loss of almost 15% of its roughly $3.5 billion budget—a massive hole that must somehow be filled.

Given the magnitude of this threat, some level of painful budget cuts and staff layoffs are likely inevitable. However, People’s Alliance is deeply concerned about reports that the Duke administration has designed and rolled out these cuts without any meaningful input from key university stakeholders, including Duke unions, faculty, and rank-and-file staff. Even worse, Duke’s leadership is asking many of its lower paid and most vulnerable workers to bear the brunt of these cuts, while apparently shielding the highest-paid staff and administrators. This is deeply unfair.

Duke is Durham’s largest employer and our residents are a critical customer base and source of revenue for the Duke hospital system, so what happens to Duke’s workers deeply impacts the Durham community. Given the consequences for Durham, the People’s Alliance calls on Duke to open up their budget adjustment process to key stakeholders, minimize the pain inflicted on its lowest-paid workers, and require the highest paid administrators to share the burden of any cost-saving measures the university adopts.

Finally, we urge Duke administrators, Durham community leaders, and elected officials to explore avenues for cooperation in the face of Trump’s assault on American life. We can no longer afford to bury our heads in the sand and hope that he will somehow forget about progressive cities like Durham or that Duke will be the one university that he miraculously decides not to target like he’s already targeted Harvard, Penn, Columbia, and the rest.

This President is coming for all of us. It’s only a matter of time. Fighting each other—instead of fighting back—will allow him to pick us off one by one. The only hope for American democracy is that we hang together, or we shall assuredly hang alone.

This statement was first published by the People's Alliance.