Third-year communication arts student Haya Kharouba was in her DAC 209 course in winter 2025 when her instructor announced the devastating news on the last day of class.

“At the end, she [said,] ‘Hey everyone, I loved teaching all of you; many of you are familiar faces that I’ve taught time and time again … but this is my last class. Your last assignment is the last assignment I will be grading,’” Kharouba recalled. “She explained that she was being let go, and, I’m not kidding, the girl next to me started turning pale.” The student sitting next to Kharouba when Brey broke the news had planned to ask Brey to be her thesis supervisor after class.

The instructor, Betsy Brey, was a mainstay in UW’s communications arts department.  While completing her PhD in UW’s English department, she taught multiple design courses, ranging from introductory courses to upper-year electives.

“Her ears were meant to listen to students and she had the voice of a teacher,” Kharouba said. “Even when I talk about her I get emotional. Every time I was doing a DAC course, I was looking for her name.” Kharouba would switch course timeslots and even take different courses to fit in a course of Brey’s that she wanted to take.

Shortly after the announcement, Kharouba saw Brey leave the room, clearly distraught. “All I could hear was her whimpering in the hallway as she was running out the door. When she left … everyone was silent for a moment. Not because ‘oh that was awkward,’ but because there was no way that was the last we’d see of Betsy Brey as a professor.”

Imprint reached out to Brey but did not receive a response. Although the course listings on Quest show that Brey returned this fall as an instructor, the impact of UW budget cuts is becoming more visible to the UW community as the new academic year begins.

The university has been experiencing increasing financial pressures in recent years, with a reported operating deficit of $75 million last year and $95 million this year. In a statement to Imprint, a UW spokesperson noted that the deficit is a result of decreased revenue from the ongoing freeze on domestic tuition, the freeze on operating grants, “a reduction of international student tuition due to the federal government’s decision to issue fewer study permits to foreign students…the retroactive impact of Bill 124 on staff salaries, and a steady rise in inflation since the COVID-19 pandemic.” UW’s leadership started creating a three-year budget plan last year, which was approved in April with the goal of balancing the books through “integrated planning, reduced spending, optimized efficiency, and revenue generation.”

As a result, several cost-cutting measures have been put into place. This includes the reduction or stoppage of some services, reduced academic offerings for students, and the contraction of the university’s workforce. The last is occurring via an institution-wide hiring freeze that started last year, the effects of which spell a markedly different future for UW students and employees.

“One part of the response by the administration to the current fiscal situation is a hiring freeze of faculty. And so this has a lot of repercussions that are not always obvious,” stated James Nugent, an associate professor in the faculty of environment and faculty-at-large member of the Senate, in an interview with Imprint. He notes that class sizes may increase as the student population grows, stretching available capacity for current teaching faculty: “You have more students to talk to in office hours, by e-mail, or on discussion board channels. You have more grading to do if you’re grading. … You have … less support [with] running and facilitating the class, and for student feedback and assessment.”

In addition, when faculty members leave, their positions are not filled, forcing faculties to economize on course offerings in the following terms. “Administrators are deciding which courses are core courses that need to be taught, or finding ways to increase class size so as to free up teaching schedule spaces for remaining existing faculty,” Nugent added. He stated that, while not an official policy, the faculty of environment is starting to implement a 20-student minimum to hold a course. The impact of this new practice would fall heaviest on upper-year electives, which tend to have fewer students enrolled. “If an elective course has less than a certain number of students … then there is a good chance that that elective course will be cut and not offered that year,” Nugent explained.

UW staff are facing similar issues caused by the hiring freeze: employment contracts are not being renewed and any reduction in staff passes on more work to those remaining, impacting services provided to students and the rest of the UW community. “In some cases, roles have been eliminated with little notice, leaving many staff members anxious about job security,” University of Waterloo Staff Association (UWSA) president Lisa Habel said in a statement to Imprint last month. According to Habel, about two-thirds of eligible staff at UW are UWSA members. About 220 UWSA members ended employment with UW in 2024 and around 150 have left this year as of Aug. 27, though these numbers include employees who left for reasons unrelated to budget cuts.

Habel also noted “growing concerns about the forthcoming rollback of remote work options, which may further affect staff well-being.” UWSA sent out a survey to its members regarding flexible and remote work arrangements in June 2025. Out of 745 responses, 83 per cent stated that the flexibility to work from home when needed was “extremely important,” with the top-ranked reason for preferring hybrid schedules being the ability to maintain work-life balance during a time of low morale as the hiring freeze continues.

Aside from staff and faculty, reduced funding for teaching assistants is also being pushed forward. Graduate students often receive part of their funding through teaching assistantship (TA) and research assistantship (RA) roles as part of their program. Nolan Shaw, a computer science PhD candidate and vice president of Unit 1 in CUPE 5524, which represents graduate teaching and research assistants, states that there is pressure from the university to reduce the maximum number of paid hours for a TA position. Standard practice at the university states that graduate students work on average 10 hours a week in a TA position, totalling 160 hours over a 16-week academic term for one TA unit. While actual assigned hours and practices differ across departments (for instance, the school of computer science assigns half TA units each worth 80 hours), Shaw stated that there is a push to decrease the maximum paid hours from 160 to 130 hours instead. This reduction would impact the education and support that undergraduate students receive, as it may lead to teaching assistants having to give poor quality feedback when marking assignments and tests due to their limited working hours. “People can already identify that at times, you’ve had a TA who’s just not giving you high quality feedback — they’re just saying, ‘You did poorly [and] you don’t get any marks for this question,’ but you don’t know why,” Shaw stated in an interview with Imprint. “Graduate students are sort of put into this position where, for the students’ sake, [they question,] ‘Do you work for free, even though you already in a lot of ways are working for free on your research work … or do you expedite your grading process and, as a result … need to be shorter on the amount of feedback that you can provide and the amount of attention that’s given to each assignment?’”

Throughout the different groups working at UW, there are consistent calls for better transparency from administration on the details concerning financial restructuring and operational changes. They also call for sustained commitment to the community’s well-being that extends beyond perceived lip service, including giving the most impacted members more say in major decisions going forward.

“The transparency we have so often been promised does not materialize when it counts, as far as I’m concerned,” Nugent remarked. Before the vote on the 2025/2026 budget in April, Nugent asked for details on where the budget cuts would occur and how they would be distributed among faculty departments and non-academic units. He was told by the provost that the requested information “was for management to know and decide, not senators. … [The] Senate and the board voted on a budget without even knowing, let alone debating, what these budget cuts actually would mean.”

Habel also adds that UWSA is advocating for staff to have a seat at the table on university-level committees and for their input to be not only heard, but valued, especially as the association enters talks to re-negotiate their Memorandum of Agreement with the university. “Many campus departments run on small, dedicated teams of staff doing great work with limited resources. … When staff are supported, we’re better able to serve the student community and achieve our shared goals as an institution.”

A UW spokesperson shared that all publicly discloseable information regarding the budget are posted on its budget plan website, which includes a FAQ page, and stated that any feedback or concerns could be directed to its dedicated email, budget@uwaterloo.ca.

Regardless of how uncertain the future is, Nugent hopes that the people at UW don’t lose sight of the importance of education beyond a perceived monetary return on investment, and the role UW plays as an institution for learning. “There are many reasons to take a university degree — [to try] to improve ourselves as human beings, to understand the meaning of being a human being, [and] to understand in a critical way what’s going on in our society. … In times of budgetary crisis, we can lose sight of the broader purpose of our universities. I do think it’s important for our community … to think hard about what the role of the university is and why we should be supporting it.”