Maya Lin knew it when she was still an undergraduate student and submitted her design to the jury deciding the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, a design that called for carving the names of the 57,939 soldiers killed in the War into her proposed monument. The families of those lost in the September 11 attacks knew it when they first began their annual ritual of reading the names of the 2,983 people killed that horrible day. The Leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement knew it when they coined the phrase, “Say Their Names.”
More than 50,000 people have been killed so far in the Israel-Hamas War. Tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians have died in the past years of the war between Russia and Ukraine. The Trump administration deported 37,660 people during its first month in office. The Biden administration averaged 57,000/month during their last year in charge. And when the dust finally settles on the Federal workforce (if it ever does), the estimates are that more than 2.4 million civilian workers will have lost their jobs.
Numbers numb. What’s 50,000 people? What’s 2 million? We report numbers so that we don’t have to fully appreciate the magnitude of devastation. It’s bloodshed, whether literally or figuratively. And reporting numbers conveniently avoids this fact.
Say. Their. Names.
For the I’ve-lost-count-of-the-number time over the past 5 years, the administration of my workplace, the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, is facing serious financial shortfalls. Once again, departments are asked to make cuts. Once again, people are losing their jobs. And, ONCE AGAIN, the “targeted furloughs/layoffs” are targeted at the same, vulnerable groups on campus.
We were told of these dire moves at the most recent “Town Hall” meeting last week. (I put the phrase in quotes, because the administration has come to take a page straight out of every politician’s playbook these days. It’s a “Town Hall” in name only. It’s a scripted, censored, presentation where every bit of the narrative is controlled by those in charge.) We were already millions of dollars in the hole before the shit show led by an insane U.S. President and his minions took hold, but the latter is wreaking more havoc and chaos on an already tenuous situation. And so, we were told again, that we must make cuts. Funny, it’s always “we”, but yet…
During this meeting, the Brady Bunch Zoom screen that we’ve all come to know since the pandemic showed us 8 faces; Chancellor Michael Collins, Executive Deputy Chancellor and Provost Terry Flotte, Executive Vice Chancellor of Administration and Finance John Lindstedt, Deputy Executive Vice Chancellor of Human Resources Carolyn Brownawell, Vice Chancellor of Government Relations John Erwin, Vice Chancellor of Diversity and Inclusion Marlina Duncan, Vice Chancellor for Advancement John Hayes, and Vice Chancellor of Management and Chief of Staff Brendan Chisholm. I say their names. Collectively these eight individuals assumed just shy of $4 million in payroll last year. “We” must make sacrifices and yet it never really is “we”.
Except for the library. WE have sacrificed. Since September of last year, nine staff members – friends and now former colleagues – have exited the building. We’ll be at 10 come the end of this month. A few of these were choices made by the individuals themselves (retirement, new jobs, well-deserved promotions that will never come to be here), but most have been forced through layoffs and permanent furloughs. And even those who left of their own accord, well their positions are never filled, thus saying to them and to those of us left behind that any and everything they accomplished in their years of service to the university really didn’t mean all that much.
And this is just my department. Just the library. Who knows how many other people have been erased from our “team” that’s supposedly “advancing together” – the ones without the lengthy titles and larger paychecks – because their names are never shared. You only learn that someone is no longer here when you reach out to ask a question or make a connection and receive the automated “I no longer work at the university” reply. It’s cruel and it’s heartless and it makes me wonder every day if I actually DO work for a MEDICAL SCHOOL. Sure feels like callous corporate America to me.
Vice Provost and Senior Associate Dean for Educational Affairs Anne Larkin, to whom the library reports, sent those of us under her charge an email yesterday, sharing a “difficult update”. Five people from the Office of Educational Affairs have lost their jobs this week. No names. Just five “members of our team”. Maybe if we wore jerseys with our names on the back of them, we’d feel more like a team because we’d actually at least know one another’s names.
But I DO know the names of two of the five because they are my colleagues and my friends. Along with the others we’ve said goodbye to over the past months, they are much more than a line item on a budget to me. And I will say their names and I will say thank you to each and every one of them. And I will mean it.
Thank you Vivian, Bob, Kris, Lisa, Grit, Cate, Tess, Regina, Gregg, and Kathy. Collectively you gave the Lamar Soutter Library and students, faculty, and staff of UMass Chan Medical School, as well as the New England region and beyond, well over 100 years of dedicated service. In these days where appreciation for the significance and importance of public service is but a dim light, I’m honored and grateful to have worked beside each and every one of you.
And thank you to the many others who have been plucked from our midst of late, names that I don’t know because they are not spoken. If you are one of them or you know the name(s) of others whose lives have been so callously upended of late, feel free to share your name, too. You matter. We all do.
A Librarian by Any Other Name 