There’s a certain kind of sadness on campus lately. Yes, finals are around the corner, but this grey-hued heaviness stretches far beyond last-minute assignments and end-of-term stress.
If you’ve been here long enough, you feel it — the absence. The heavy silence. That quiet isn’t just emotional — it’s structural.
It’s far easier to say that 45 employees were laid off to address the deficit — once $21 million, now $2.4 million — than it is to give a name and a face to those numbers. They’ve been called “positions,” “reductions.” But the campus feels the loss of people.
People who held the institutional memory that doesn’t fit neatly into a spreadsheet.
This is the story of the few who chose to speak about being part of the first wave of layoffs.
The unquantifiable human value
Aakash Dean, a Study Abroad Coordinator at UFV International, supported both UFV students heading overseas and international students arriving in Abbotsford — everything from applications and safety briefings to course registration, orientation, and the kind of intercultural support that helps students feel less alone in a new country.
Dean told The Cascade that while his kind of work didn’t bring in revenue, it built relationships, trust, and helped make UFV feel like a place that cared — something he deeply appreciated.
“I put more than a 100 per cent into what I did, and I really enjoyed it. [I] always used to say that I feel like I have the best job.”
When the cuts came, his role was among the first to go.
This was his first professional position after graduating from UFV in 2022, and he spent years learning the nuances of supporting exchange students. Dean shared that students trusted him enough to come to him with homesickness, culture shock, and personal challenges that might feel intimidating to voice elsewhere.
“We’ve tried to become their support system … We can’t solve all the problems, but at the same time, we had that trust with the students that they felt it was easier to come to us before they would go to other resources.”
He also noted that exchange programs are often misunderstood as a financial loss for the university. In reality, each incoming exchange student opens a spot for a UFV student to study abroad while still paying UFV tuition.
“Even when a UFV student is studying in Barcelona on exchange, they are still paying UFV tuition. Which is why there’s no revenue loss in that case.”
The reciprocal model allows students to access international learning without it being financially out of reach, while fostering the kind of intercultural understanding that Dean sees as essential in our diverse communities.
The university is keeping the program running, as they’ve chosen to maintain Dean’s partner on the roster. But Dean explained that the impact is still inevitable and immediate with his partner’s workload doubling overnight.
“We were a team of two,” he explained. “Now it’s only one person who is going to do all [that] we both did.”
Losing more than a job
Before he could make sense of what the layoff meant for the program, Dean had to face the moment it became real — the morning he returned from vacation and found a meeting with HR waiting for him.
“I walked into my office in the morning, 8:00 a.m. … [and] within the first hour I was notified that there was a calendar invite about a meeting with HR. That’s when I kind of put [it together].”
Dean recalled that he went in already bracing himself, but hearing the words out loud still hit hard.
“Even while I was listening, my mind was thinking, ‘What am I ever going to be if not this?’ … This position sums up 90 per cent of my professional working experience. I don’t know what else I can be other than a study abroad coordinator.”
As HR outlined his options — severance, recall, or bumping a less?senior employee — Dean commented that his thoughts spiralled toward something beyond employment: his ability to stay in the country.
“I’m on a closed work permit with UFV,” he said. “If I lose my employment with UFV right now, then I’m not able to work in Canada anymore … Would I have to go back home? Would I just be unemployed and [unable to] work anywhere else?”
Dean explained that he remembers the moment in fragments.
“Nothing much was happening, but it felt like too much was happening around me.”
Navigating a new system had already been overwhelming when he first arrived in Canada, and the job had become an anchor — a place where he knew what he was doing and felt grounded.
Despite the fear, Dean claims he doesn’t regret any of it.
“I always tried to do the right thing by caring [and] doing the job as best as I could, and I truly, thoroughly enjoyed the last three and a half years I’ve done this job. Every day was so rewarding.”
The role had influenced him in ways he didn’t expect. Dean said that the job even shifted his academic path. He began taking communication courses — advanced public speaking, mass communication — to better support students from different cultural backgrounds.
“I understood how important communication is when you’re talking to audiences outside of Canada.”
Dean also claimed his role deepened his interest in travel. On his recent vacation, he went to South Korea, a country he’d grown curious about after sending and receiving students there.
“[I] learned so much about that country. I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to use it in this role anymore, because I just have a few days left, but it was still worth the experience.”
Decades of craft behind the curtain
Dean’s experience is not an isolated one. All across campus, others are carrying their own versions of this loss, each shaped by the work they love and the futures they now must reimagine.
For some, that loss comes after decades of service. Heather Robertson, the wardrobe manager of the Theatre department, has been at UFV since the fall of 1999.
Asked what it was like in her early years at UFV, she described a very different era.
“When I first got the job, we had a theatre in Chilliwack. We did very large productions — casts of 18, 19, 20 students.”
Back then, Robertson said she only had herself and a team of community volunteers helping build the shows. They produced three shows a season, a large fall production, a Shakespeare play every spring, and a smaller January show with a cast anywhere from four to 12.
“I was a lot younger then,” she added.
Robertson shared that when her youngest child started school, she returned to her own studies, taking art and theatre classes while sewing costumes for community productions — something she’d grown up around through her mother and mother?in?law, both of whom worked in costuming.
“My mother-in-law worked in professional theatre for a company in Vancouver as their dresser, and my mom, when I was a kid, used to make ballet tutu’s so that I could afford to take dance lessons, so [I’ve] always been around costumes.”
Before UFV, Robertson held a mix of creative roles: coordinating volunteers for the Harrison Festival of the Arts, curating annual exhibits, and even building props for film and TV. That extensive experience, along with her IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees) union card, made her a natural fit for UFV, who was looking for someone to help students bridge into professional film and theatre work.
“I was tired of getting up at four o’clock in the morning and driving into Vancouver, so I was quite happy to take on a job where I was needed from September to the end of April; I got time off to spend with my kids and be close to home.”
When asked how she would explain her job to someone outside theatre, Robertson gestured toward the racks of garments around us. Much of UFV’s costume inventory, she noted, grew out of community donations in Chilliwack, where the department was once based. Families brought in antique dresses, suits, and even military uniforms — some dating back to the Korean War — creating an immense collection rich with history.
“There are some beautiful vintage pieces of dresses and suits, and many stories that go with them.”
As wardrobe manager, Robertson shared that she has spent years caring for that legacy: cataloguing and preserving the pieces, repairing what time has worn, and knowing exactly which garments can be washed, steamed, or even delicately “French cleaned” to keep them from deteriorating.
But her work goes far past maintenance. She helps students design and curate costumes for productions, fits garments to actors of every shape and size, and builds new pieces when the inventory can’t meet a show’s needs.
“Everybody who goes on stage deserves a costume that fits them well and they feel comfortable in, so that they can do their job as an actor.”
Heather laughed as she explained that a friend once told her she should never call herself a “wardrobe manager.”
“A wardrobe is a piece of furniture,” the friend insisted. “We’re costumers.”
It was a title Robertson claims she wore with pride, teaching students everything from basic sewing to the backstage skills that keep a production running.
“Students learn all sorts of funny things that might be considered old-fashioned in today’s world because again, the costumes suit the era of the shows.”
Beyond the fittings and the sewing machines, Robertson explained that her role carried a quiet kind of intimacy, often meeting students at vulnerable moments. Sometimes that meant navigating insecurities around measurements — asking what they were comfortable with and offering to keep numbers private; other times, it meant helping them find clothing that aligned with how they identified.
“I have, on a couple of occasions, had a student walk by and say, ‘I’m transitioning, but I don’t know what size I am in this gender’s clothing. Could you help me?’ And I will just give them measurements and say, ‘Okay, if you wanna buy a dress, I think that you’d be this size.’”
Part of her work, she insisted, meant continually evolving — unlearning preconceptions so she could hold space for every student’s needs.
“It’s really important to meet every student where they’re at,” she said. “Just because someone presents this [way] in my mind, doesn’t mean that’s how they see themselves.”
The fragility of care in the system
There is an element of care — who gives it, who receives it, and what happens when the people who hold the institution together are treated as expendable. For Robertson, that truth became painfully clear when her own position was cut.
The way the news was delivered caught her off guard. She had anticipated cuts, but not the complete removal of her role or the shift to contracted labour.
“I had thought that these cuts might impact our area, but I thought that it would be reduced hours over the couple of areas that go backstage, not that one area would be eliminated … I’m no longer a costumer.”
What troubled her most wasn’t just the loss of the job, but the way the decision was made.
“I’m surprised [that] in this day and age these cu ts are being made in such an un-decolonized, very colonial, patriarchal way … that we weren’t, as [SOCA] or as a theatre department, told, ‘You guys need to reduce your budget by this amount of money’ [or] ‘Let’s collectively solve the problem.’ … It was done in that very old-fashioned way of ‘the something entity out there who [knows] better than you, [is] going to tell you that this is what you’re gonna do.’”
Robertson said she doesn’t believe the people who delivered the news were the ones who decided her job would disappear.
“Someone whose face I don’t even know [made that decision].”
To Robertson, the moment underscored the distance between the values she practiced every day — care, reuse, community — and the way the decision about her role was made. The Theatre department has long practiced sustainability out of necessity — reusing garments, preserving pieces that date back to the 1980s, caring for an inventory built through decades of community generosity.
“There are things in this costume shop that have been here as long as I’ve been here and older … It is a museum.”
When asked what would happen to the inventory she’d spent decades caring for, Robertson shook her head. Anything she could offer, she said, would only be speculation.
Robertson felt the choice came from people far removed from the work itself, people who might not even know where these historic garments came from or what they represent.
Losing the position, Robertson commented, won’t just change how costumes are made — it could shift the culture of the program, whether in big productions or last-minute confidence boosters.
“Getting costumes on a show is only a small part of what this shop does for people. There are so many other problems we solve here … The number of times [students say] ‘I need this, I need a hat for this’, or [ask] if they could wear a hat that shades part of their face or put on a cape that makes them feel not so vulnerable. They can do that presentation in a class in a different way with that security blanket.”
Dean sees a similar kind of transformation in his work — students who walk into his office unsure, anxious, or overwhelmed, and return from studying abroad with a different sense of themselves.
“Sometimes they come in not even knowing we exist,” he said. “By the time they come back, you can hear the confidence in their voice. They’re ready to conquer the world.”
Whether Robertson remains at UFV or not, the role she built over 27 years — the costumer position and its accumulated work — has been removed from the department.
The aftermath of quiet cuts
The loss of the costumer position does not stand alone. Across UFV, programs and people are feeling the strain: six of 11 staff positions in SOCA were cut with six more in UFV International, MOLA (Modern Languages) faces 55 per cent reductions, 40 early?retirement agreements made across the institution. Taken together, these shifts can paint a picture of an institution slowly and quietly thinning out — not just in budgets, but in the kinds of care, culture, and community it’s able or willing to sustain.
In the end, Robertson described the time as both sad and strangely fulfilling.
“It’s been a great honour … Not many people get to be excited about going to their job every day.”
Being around young people, watching them make things, it’s the kind of energy that kept her feeling, as Robertson put it, “21 forever,” adding that being paid to create alongside students felt like a blessing.
“I get to be around young people, and they get to make things, and they pay me for it. That’s crazy … Now I don’t. And it’s weird.”
In the middle of his own uncertainty, Dean kept circling back to the people around him — the co-workers suddenly carrying double workloads, the colleagues doing quiet mental math about who might be next, the atmosphere of worry that settles over a department when information arrives without reassurance.
“It’s hard to see other colleagues or other co-workers being stressed out … I hope that people who are impacted … are able to connect with others and are able to feel better. Because I can see that everybody around me, even the people who are not being laid off, are still impacted by these changes.”
When asked why he agreed to speak, Dean answered that he hoped it would be a way for others who are struggling to feel seen.
“There are so many people like me who are impacted, but it’s hard to talk … If ever somebody reads [this, and] they are able to not just relate to it but also feel like they’re able to see the real picture and themselves in me, [maybe] they’ll feel that they’re not alone and in the end, it’s all going to be fine.”
Out of 45 people invited to share their experiences with The Cascade, two came forward. In an institution that celebrates community, people should feel safe to tell the truth about what is happening to them.
As more cuts roll out, the weight of these decisions is already being carried by the people who remain. If students believe this won’t touch them, they may feel it soon enough: fewer advisors, fewer course offerings, longer wait times, more pressure on the staff who stay, and a campus that feels like it’s shrinking around them.
The future as a collective choice
There is a way through this that doesn’t hollow out the heart of the university. It requires pressure — from students, from departments, from the communities that make this place livable. It requires standing with the people whose work holds everything together: the advisor who remembers your name, the instructor who made you believe you could finish your degree, the staff member who supported you on a bad day.
When those people are treated like numbers, the responsibility falls on the community to change that. Students inherit the consequences of decisions they never got to vote on — and they are the ones with the power to demand something different.
If the university hopes to survive these cuts without dismantling the community that makes this place worth being in, it must lobby harder. Fight for the people who hold your students together. Protect the programs that give this campus its character.
A learning institution is only as strong as the care it invests in its own people. Community isn’t maintained by slogans — it’s maintained by action.
