October 10, 2025

Week 38

Oct 4-10, 2025 - failure state

Hi friends,

I love it when a conversation leads to a fresh way of thinking about an old frustration. As I was struggling with how to cope with a conflict earlier this week, my brilliant friend casually said, “It’s important that we know what people’s failure states are.” It transfixed me.

She was referring to how a person - or a team - reacts when they are pushed past the limits of what they can handle. Some of us go hot: we explode or melt down. Others go cold: we freeze up and stop communicating.¹ Some dynamics are more likely than others to spiral out of control and damage everything in the vicinity. That’s why understanding them is so important.

We have to know our own failure states, recognize when our people are hitting theirs, and design our projects to be as resilient as possible to the particular ways we are prone to break down. 

This was a slightly quiet stretch, but the perfect time to reflect on pressure. Let’s take stock of Week 38. 

What’s happening now

• When I started writing this afternoon, the  biggest story was heartening news - MIT declined the so-called compact for higher ed. In an open letter posted this morning, MIT President Kornbluth wrote, "The premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone." MIT is the first university to answer the administration. When we think about the other eight, it’s broadly helpful to know that the AAUP and faculty senates have been busy. But here are some quick specifics:

  • Brown - President Christina Paxson published a letter today that begins with an update on the university’s existing $50 million deal with the administration.² She labels the choice at hand as, “how or whether to respond to the invitation to provide comments” on the compact by October 20.³ 

  • Dartmouth - on October 3, President Sian Leah Beilock issued one of the first responses we saw from leadership: “we will never compromise our academic freedom and our ability to govern ourselves.” Hundreds of faculty have signed a petition demanding that Beilock officially reject the compact. 

  • University of Arizona - On Wednesday, the city council said, “Capitulation is not in Tucson’s nature” and passed a unanimous resolution against the compact. Faculty had previously voted to reject it, and just today passed a new motion to move forward with an  “inter-institutional group” uniting faculty leaders of the targeted universities.⁴ President Suresh Garimella assured his community that he’s examining the issue with the university regents. 

  • UPenn - Until today, I had not realized that the (billionaire) chief architect of the compact is the sitting chair of the Wharton School Board of Advisors.⁵ Isn’t that something? Faculty, staff, and students are pushing back, with a special meeting and a 1000+ signature petition. Penn President Larry Jacobson said Sunday that, “Penn seeks no special consideration.” As we’re seeing elsewhere, state lawmakers are moving to block state funding to the university if it complies. 

  • USC - On Monday, interim President Beong-Soo Kim joined hundreds of faculty at a special meeting of the Academic Senate. He asked that his silence not be over-interpreted, and expects the conversation to “take time.” Meanwhile, faculty, staff, and students argue that, “Whatever the consequences of refusal, agreeing would imperil the very mission of the University.”⁶

  • UT Austin - Well, the Chair of the UT System Board of Regents used the words “honored” and “enthusiastic” regarding compact, and things look rather grim.⁷ But Texas AAUP is affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers - they are organizing against the compact and conducting campus-specific Know Your Rights training on academic freedoms.

  • UVA - Last Friday, the faculty senate overwhelmingly passed a resolution urging UVA leadership to reject the proposal outright. On Monday, Interim President⁸ Paul Mahoney sent a community survey and memo saying “It would be difficult for the University to agree to certain provisions.” On Tuesday, Virginia state legislators warned that nearly $300 million in state support is at stake. If UVA signs, the senators declare they will ensure that the state does not, “subsidize an institution that has ceded its independence to federal political control.”

  • Vanderbilt - On Wednesday, the faculty senate approved its resolution to reject the compact. Hundreds more have signed a petition against it, which was delivered via a cross-campus protest march.

• Turning our attention to a very different kind of stress, a brand-new report from Microsoft Threat Intelligence about ”payroll pirates” targeting university employees caught my attention. The “financially motivated threat actor” seems to be specifically targeting Workday but poses a threat to all HR software with salary and bank account information. Only three universities have identified cases in this report, but the details disturbed me.⁹ This has been happening since March, but this is not the time I think anyone can afford to miss paychecks. Be careful out there, friends.

• For the past two issues, I’ve been writing about National Parks under the shutdown. Over 60% of NPS staff are furloughed, which means services and rangers are severely lacking. While some people are putting themselves in danger in Yosemite, other places like Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons seem relatively quiet, and some visitors are focused on how they can help our parks now and in the future. At a larger scale, Utah, Tennessee, and West Virginia are using state funds to keep national parks like Zion and the Great Smoky Mountains open. 

• Finally, just a small note about the newest rounds of layoffs today. My brevity does not reflect the severity of this, just the timing. At CDC, dozens of people were laid off via emails that went out late this evening. My group chats are dire, but I’ll stick to what’s been confirmed and published, because that’s bad enough. If the reporting is correct, the layoffs include nearly the entire staff of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.¹⁰ We don’t yet understand the full scope of things, but I’m feeling gutted.

What’s next & what to do

One commonality across many failure states is the inability to focus, so I will keep this extra short. 

Kelly Hayes¹¹ has a new book coming out next month called Read This When Things Fall Apart. Kelly describes the chapters as organized as a crisis directory. Read this in case of heartbreak. Read this in case of a setback. Read whatever you need for your own failure state. Take a look and decide if it might be something that helps you or your people. Buy a copy, or see if you can put a hold on a copy at your local public library. If you have the means and feel so inspired, you can even purchase a copy for an activist in need. 

I subscribe to Kelly’s newsletter and find such depth and hope there. She’s on the frontlines in Chicago right now, so I’d like to throw support behind her right now. She does for me what I hope I might do for you.

Our breaking points do not define us. Our failure states are not permanent. May our bonds, however tested and tired they may be, make the pressure more bearable and recovery more rapid. 

Liz