Why are universities w/ multi-billion $$ endowments announcing wage cuts/freezes, hiring freezes, letting “non-essential” workers go, etc.? This article, shared by many folks already, goes a long way towards explaining things: https://bit.ly/2X8x8L3 

Here are three sobering findings:
"The authors fail to find consistent evidence that universities change endowment payouts to offset shocks to other sources of university revenues.” (they looked at info after 2001-02 & 2008-09 crashes).

"In addition to reducing tenure-system faculty, universities react to negative shocks by also cutting support employees...no effect, however, on the number of adjunct faculty or administrators.”

Yes, you read that right. We will see more adjuctification/casualization of academic labor and possibly more growth in administrative positions. Happened after 2008-09, right?

"We create a variable “president’s benchmark”...the ratio of the current endowment size to its size at the beginning of the president’s tenure, the idea being that univ leadership may be particularly sensitive to growing the size of the endowment from what they inherited.”

No matter how well-intentioned a university leader might be, at the end of the day, growing the endowment is a critical benchmark.

Friends who really understand this strange world of university finances, please do chime in.