There are 125 open positions at the University of Vermont. And for the next two months, the majority of those jobs very likely won’t be filled. That’s after the university announced a 60-day hiring pause starting this week, citing uncertainty of multiple sources of federal funding and the potential for a partial federal government shutdown next week.
“We think it’s better to not be hiring people if we don’t know if we can continue to afford to pay them,” Richard Cate, vice president for finance at UVM, said in an interview.
The hiring pause applies to all open faculty, staff and postdoc positions, not to temporary or student positions. Cate said the university will honor offers already extended and they'll make some exceptions to the hiring pause — like to replace faculty members who are retiring at the end of the year.
Multiple universities across the country have enacted hiring freezes in recent weeks. That's as the Trump administration has repeatedly threatened to cut funding for research, including executive orders blocking funding for research related to race and gender and reducing grant funding from the National Institutes of Health — a policy that has been temporarily halted in federal court.
“Whether it’s NIH, or NSF (National Science Foundation) or the Department of Agriculture, they’re all about the degree to which the federal government will support the cost of the research,” Cate said. “All of the proposals that have been out there would reduce what they’re currently paying.”
The university received over $266 million in research funding last year, including $49 million from the NIH.
Last month, Kirk Dombrowski, vice president for research at UVM, told Vermont Public that research activities related to government contracts would continue as normal for the time being.
"As it is right now, we don’t have any reason to stop doing what we’ve always done," he said.
Separately, the university was already planning for a roughly 2% reduction in spending to cover the rising costs of employee health insurance.
For now, Cate said the pause in hiring is a way to buy time to better understand what changes might happen and when.
"Hopefully we know more in 60 days," he said.
“If there is still a lot of unanswered questions at that point, we might well extend.”
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