From the campus newspaper at George Washington University: “GW Law lays off personnel amid financial challenges, dean confirms”

GW Law laid off personnel to tackle the school’s financial challenges, its dean confirmed Wednesday, marking the third school to publicly confirm layoffs this fiscal year. 

Dean Dayna Bowen Matthew confirmed in an email to The Hatchet the school conducted a “restructuring and reduction” in its workforce to combat the school’s financial challenges, which she said were driven by external factors like new laws, evolving funding and financial aid policies and changing demographics.” … “As a result, GW Law remains on strong financial footing.”

The story goes on to give context at George Washington University. Other GWU schools have endured staff cuts; the university as a whole faces a structural budget deficit.

There is a bit more.

My own reaction to the news from GWU Law was to connect those developments to my observations (and my experiences) with other, less nationally noteworthy law schools, where cuts to operating budgets have been an occasional feature of academic life for at least 15 years, and where the euphemism “changing demographics” has already started to manifest concretely in “fewer applicants that we want to enroll.” And I connect the news from GWU also to these earlier quasi-Shakespearean notes from me. Is there a cliff coming for law schools? And “the better question is no longer whether [law schools] want to change. It’s which ones are prepared to.”

Shakespearean in the Twelfth Night sense:

Some are born to change, some achieve change, and others have change thrust upon them.