The women’s basketball coach stood atop a ladder on Sunday night, carefully cutting down the last of the net after Haskell Indian Nations University won the league championship.

The scene is a familiar one at this time of year in college basketball. But the celebration in Lawrence, Kan., where the man who invented the sport worked for decades, was nevertheless astonishing: Officially, Haskell’s coach, Adam Strom, was only a volunteer.

He had been fired 16 days earlier, swept up in an executive order that led Haskell to oust about a quarter of its workers on a Friday in February.

The only other federally run college for Native people, Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in Albuquerque, also laid off a similar share of workers that day.

More than 140 years after the United States first used the grounds in Lawrence as a boarding school to assimilate Native children, Haskell students feel that the federal government, which controls the university, has once again become a malevolent force upending lives.

The student government association president said three of her five instructors had been dismissed. Rumors had swirled over whether enough dining hall workers were left to serve meals. A senior had wondered whether the university, a sanctum for Native American students shaped by tradition and tragedy, would remain open long enough for him to receive his degree.