Computational Complexity: Unexpected Unemployment
Wednesday, August 12, 2026
Unexpected Unemployment
Enjoying Idaho while ignoring Illinois<br>Today is the first day of my life that I am unemployed. And not by choice.
As I mentioned on LinkedIn last week, me and about 160 of my colleagues, staff and faculty, untenured and tenured, lost our positions at Illinois Tech after they declared "financial exigency" which allows them to eliminate tenured positions. I'll use this post to tell my story, but keep in mind there are 160 other ones.
The president announced that he would be asking the board to declare financial exigency in mid-July so we knew layoffs were coming but not when. On July 25th, we left for a planned 12-day vacation to Idaho. Why Idaho? It's my fiftieth state, so my wife and I decided to make a vacation of it. We saw Boise, canyons, craters, mountains, lakes. We were in Twin Falls three days before a mass shooting but that's a different story.
Usually I avoid reading work emails on vacation but decided I probably should this time. And on day four of vacation, I got an email invite to a meeting with the Vice-Provost of Faculty Affairs and an HR representative titled "Organizational Update" and I knew my fate was sealed. By the next day I was tired thinking about it and just decided to enjoy the rest of the vacation and deal with everything when I got back last Thursday. It might have been better if I simply didn't read email like usual.
It really hit me as I started to pack up my office Monday, for the first time with no office on the other side. Monday was also the first day of orientation week and a group of new students walked by as I was packing boxes into my car, though I don't think they noticed.
Illinois Tech got hit hard by a large drop in foreign graduate enrollment due to changing visa requirements, general anti-US sentiment, more opportunities in other countries and a weaker job market for graduating Masters students partly due to artificial intelligence. Universities face challenges beyond international students including Baumol's disease, administrative bloat to meet expanding regulations, the demographic cliff, reduced grant funding, and less support of universities by the public and both political parties, and AI changing how and why we teach. Illinois Tech is one of the first tech research schools to eliminate tenured roles, but it won't be the last.
I'll be okay but many of the other faculty could really use another position, in some cases so they can stay in the US. If you have opportunities for faculty in any discipline, let me know and I'll pass it along.
Posted by
Lance Fortnow
at
8:32 AM
Email ThisBlogThis!Share to XShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest
2 comments:
space200111:27 AM, August 12, 2026<br>Not to make light of the precarious situation with higher-ed or employment opportunities...<br>As can be inferred from the haze above the Idaho plains climate calamity is already at our doorsteps; AI is only making things worse than it already is; a few survivors will stare back aghast at the fiasco us humans have wrought on this planet.<br>https://apnews.com/article/hottest-month-july-climate-change-4a9d612281485356103631f0f09b61af<br>SolarUp - The vast majority of us, even those of us who know the climate is changing for the worst, will continue on as we always have. Meanwhile, the pot slowly picks up the boil. Such is the human tragedy.<br>ReplyDelete<br>Replies<br>Reply
Anonymous11:45 AM, August 12, 2026<br>Best of luck with your future! Relevant article: https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/what-happens-to-college-towns-after<br>ReplyDelete<br>Replies<br>Reply
Add comment
Load more...
Older Post
Home
Subscribe to:<br>Post Comments (Atom)
Books
Commissions earned from Amazon Links
Mastodon Feed
Blog Links
Bill's Home Page
Lance's Home Page
Favorite Theorems
Foundations of Complexity Lessons
Graduate Student Guide
ChatPNP
CACM P v NP Survey (2009)
CACM Fifty Years of P vs. NP (2022)
CACM Conference Viewpoint
Podcasts
Videos
Posts Feed
Comments Feed
Popular Posts
Eisenhower's Farewell Address
Math books you can actually read
Unexpected Unemployment
Impagliazzo's Five Worlds
Would Erdos have been happy with the resolution of the Erdos Unit Distance Problem? How to find out?
Bipartite Perfect Matching in Deterministic NC
The Wife and The Mistress
The 17x17 challenge. Worth $289.00. This is not a joke.
If you find a mistake in someone elses paper you should....
A problematic category on Jeopardy Raises a Good Question
Complexity Links
Complexity Conference
SIGACT
Theory Announcements
Theory Stack Exchange
Complexity Zoo
Complexity on arXiv
Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity
Blog Archive
2026
(62)
August
(3)
Unexpected Unemployment
Math Concepts With Funny Names
A problematic category on Jeopardy Raises a Good...