With these words in June, President Michael Kotlikoff announced what he called “financial austerity” at Cornell: “We must immediately address our significant financial shortfalls by reducing costs and enacting permanent change to our operational model.”
Let’s be clear: financial austerity is a political choice. It is a choice that chooses to abandon the working-class students who keep this campus running.
As student dining workers at Cornell, we have watched our working conditions deteriorate in real time. The rubber shoe covers that once protected us from burns around the kitchen have been replaced with flimsy ones that fall apart halfway through shifts and become slipping hazards themselves. Students who signed up for the Early Work program — an annual program in which Cornell Dining employs student workers before the semester begins in exchange for bonuses paid in bonus Big Red Bucks, a complimentary meal plan and a waived early move-in fee — were left waiting through weeks of hiring delays and shift assignment failures from Cornell Dining. As a result, they were unable to fulfill the program’s requirements, which demand 12 additional shifts and perfect attendance standing before any bonus is actually paid out. We are asked to operate machinery that we have not been trained to use, stationed in understaffed dining halls where we work hard to pick up the slack, all while Cornell’s $11.8 billion endowment earned a 12.3% return in the past fiscal year.
Austerity is not a financial necessity. It is a choice.
Cornell’s administration claims it faces “profound financial challenges,” citing the federal government’s temporary freeze on research funding that lasted from April 2025 through early November. Yet on Nov. 7, 2025, the very same day Kotlikoff announced the restoration of more than $250 million in federal research funding, the cuts to student dining workers continued. The federal crisis has been resolved. Cornell’s research partnership with the government has been “revive[d],” as Kotlikoff himself declared. Yet the austerity imposed on student workers, justified by that crisis, remains in place. If the federal funding freeze was truly the reason for these cuts, why haven’t they been reversed?
The University’s endowment stands at $11.8 billion. Cornell is not poor by any definition of the word. Kotlikoff writes about “unsustainable increase in expenses,” describing an institution on the brink of financial ruin. In reality, he is describing an institution that has decided it would rather cut the hours and wages of dining workers than dip into its vast reserves to protect the students who depend on these jobs to stay enrolled.
Cornell’s administration is using the federal funding crisis as cover for budget cuts they wanted to make anyway. Kotlikoff’s version of “working together” requires the most vulnerable members of our community to shoulder the burden. Student dining workers — many of us relying on Federal Work Study and working multiple jobs just to pay tuition, rent and food costs — are forced to bear the brunt so that Cornell’s bottom line remains comfortable.
Other universities facing similar federal pressures have chosen to make different choices, to buffer students from federal cuts rather than compound them. Cornell, under Kotlikoff’s leadership, has chosen the opposite. Cornell, in collaborating with the Trump administration, is not standing with its students. It is standing with the forces actively working to make higher education less accessible to working-class Americans.
As one student dining worker wrote in a statement submitted through our online petition: “I do not trust the University to honor student concerns and demands for change. Student workers deserve to be safe, paid, and listened to by Cornell's administration. I am disgusted that our University continues to seek ways to cave to the demands of the Trump Administration, especially when it affects the necessary work that student workers do. I am tired of having students' rights jeopardized by our president's cowardice. I am angry that dining workers are even facing the possibility of lower hours and wages when Cornell has the money and resources to support them.”
This anger is justified. Academic departments across campus have already been victims of austerity measures, with hiring freezes and budget cuts threatening the high quality education Cornell claims to provide. New student dining workers, more than 700 positions worth, are next on the chopping block. We are being told that Cornell cannot afford to maintain our hours, our wages, our basic safety equipment or even the positions themselves, while the administration pays $30 million to the federal government as part of its “collaboration” agreement and invests another $30 million in agricultural research.
Cornell’s founding principle promises “any person, any study.” But what does that promise mean when the institution makes it impossible for working-class students to afford to stay? When we are forced to choose between our safety and our paychecks? When we are overworked, understaffed and asked to operate dangerous equipment without proper training or protection?
We are not asking for charity. We are demanding the respect and safety we are legally entitled to under the National Labor Relations Act, and that Cornell can easily afford. We demand an end to the austerity program. We demand protection of our wages, hours, benefits, Personal Protective Equipment and positions. We demand that Cornell stop using federal pressure as an excuse to gut the working conditions of the students who keep this campus fed.
President Kotlikoff speaks of unity, but solidarity is a mutual concept. Cornell must choose: Will it stand with its working-class students, or will it continue to sacrifice us on the altar of optional “financial austerity”?
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