The Penn Museum laid off three employees earlier this month amid ongoing financial insecurity.
The meseum’s assistant registrar, head of photography studio, and interpretative planner were all informed that their positions had been discontinued, a Penn Museum employee — who requested anonymity due to fear of professional retaliation — told The Daily Pennsylvanian. The employee attributed the decision to the University’s ongoing hiring freeze.
A request for comment was left with a Penn Museum spokesperson.
“Budgetary pressure forces decisions to cut good people, good employees who add so much value to programs and the overall learning environment at Penn, with repercussions that can’t be completely calculated,” the employee said. “It’s very disruptive to the operations of the place and to everyone’s morale to find out that your coworkers are gone.”
The layoffs come weeks after the Penn Museum announced the indefinite suspension of its anthropology summer camp. A Penn Museum webpage also attributed the decision to eliminate the youth summer program — which ran for nearly three decades — to the University’s ongoing hiring freeze.
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College junior Izzy Feinfeld, a student exhibition intern at the Penn Museum, told the DP that the interpretative planner had been involved in three exhibits this year. Before the employee’s dismissal, the two had collaborated on the project Feinfeld is currently working on — a student-curated exhibition for contemporary Indigenous art titled “Between Worlds/Entre Mundos: Visions of the Wixaritari.”
Feinfeld explained that the interpretive planner did “an immense amount of work” for the student curators.
“That’s why I was so surprised to hear this news,” Feinfeld said. “She worked day in and day out to support this project.”
He added, “I can say with full confidence that if she were not on this exhibit, it would have turned out much worse, it would have taken much longer, and we would not have had the same quality of information that we ended up with.”
The Penn Museum’s funding structure has seen significant changes in recent years. In March 2025, the Institute of Museum and Library Services — which serves as the primary source of federal funding for museums, libraries, and other educational institutions across the country — was dismantled. In fiscal year 2024, the institute awarded Penn over $1 million in funding.
Last April, after a wave of measures from 1968 Wharton Graduate and President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, the Penn Museum also received notice that its grants would no longer be paid out by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute.
Another student employee at the museum — who requested anonymity for fear of professional retaliation — told the DP that their former colleagues were “always on top of things” and described the terminations as a “blow.”
“I couldn’t imagine doing it without her there,” the student said, reflecting on their collaboration with an employee whose position had been eliminated. “I was really shocked when that happened.”
The student described feeling “left in the dark” about the layoffs, especially because their colleague “worked so closely with us on this project and everything that everyone is going to see … is going to be a lot of her work and a lot of her input and a lot of her care.”
“Knowing that I’m going to be in a field like this and just being in the humanities in general, things can be very capricious and uncertain, and that’s just kind of scary,” the student added. “It makes going into this field seem a little less stable.”
According to a strategic institutional plan the museum released in May 2024, ongoing operations and several programs are funded “by a combination of University support, existing budgetary resources, grants, and gifts from individuals and foundations.”
The plan outlines ten museum-wide goals to be achieved by 2027, as well as two Signature Initiatives of building and transforming existing galleries and repatriation work that advance the museum’s “core mission areas of research, collections stewardship, education, interpretation, and audience experiences.”
“Our communities are not satisfied to passively absorb the content we create for them but rightfully expect to be partners in its creation,” the plan read. “Students are not content to simply sit in lecture halls; they seek hands-on, engaging, and experiential learning and training.”
“I think that one of the strengths of the Penn Museum is that it’s really involved with undergraduate research and allows undergraduates to be immersed in the museum working environment,” Feinfeld said. “To have a student exhibition supports the mission of the museum to explore the inquiry of humanity, and I really think that [the interpretive planner’s] firing compromises this mission.”
Staff reporter Candice Felderer covers admissions and can be reached at felderer@thedp.com. At Penn, she studies philosophy, politics, and economics.