How Years of Deficit Spending Left One University Especially Vulnerable When the Pandemic Hit

Ominous signs of financial problems appeared at Missouri Western State University in the fall of 2016.

The university’s student newspaper uncovered years of deficit spending. State funding was shrinking. Enrollment too. Yet expenses kept rising.

Some faculty members pushed for a “no confidence” vote to express their displeasure with the then president, Robert Vartabedian, who had led the university since 2008. But rather than declare open war, the Faculty Senate chose to quietly prod Missouri Western’s leaders to address the budget crisis.

That didn’t happen. Instead, the university’s Board of Governors gave Vartabedian a three-year contract extension and a pay raise of more than $14,000. Last year, when he retired as president, the board named a residence hall in his honor.

All the while, Missouri Western’s financial troubles continued to escalate.

And now the bill has come due.

At a time when American higher education reels from one layoff announcement after another, Missouri Western’s recently disclosed job losses rank among the worst: a total of 50 teaching positions cut, representing about a quarter of the faculty. The coronavirus pandemic has worsened the situation, but the roots of Missouri Western’s budget woes stretch back years.

“I get angry, but I’m mostly sad,” said Elise M. Hepworth, president of the Faculty Senate. Hepworth attributed the university’s problems to poor planning, mismanagement, and “too many people being asleep at the wheel.”

Twenty of the laid-off faculty members are tenured professors, who will, under the terms of the separation, teach for one more year before losing their jobs.

Staff cuts began earlier, in the fall, and roughly 70 staff or administrative jobs have been eliminated in total.

Missouri Western, like many colleges around the country, faces the dual challenges of shrinking enrollment and reduced state funding. Regional public universities are highly dependent on tuition dollars, as they typically lack the alternative revenue streams and big-money fund raising available to state flagships.

Missouri Western’s financial freefall is a stark lesson in what can happen when those structural headwinds aren’t dealt with.

Vartabedian, who retired as president last June, could not be reached for comment. His successor, Matthew J. Wilson, told The Chronicle that the widespread cuts are “a heartbreaking process.”

“It’s one that I never envisioned. It’s one that I never signed up for,” Wilson said. “These are steps that we need to take.”

Wilson’s arrival as president coincided with a mostly new Board of Governors, as past members’ terms expired. The university’s new leadership was quickly alarmed at the depth of the budget crisis, and Missouri Western declared financial exigency in March — a step that opened the door to cutting tenured faculty positions.

50 Majors Vaporized

All told, nearly 50 academic majors are being phased out. Among the programs lost: economics, English, and political science. Wilson emphasized that the university had identified low-enrollment programs for cost savings and that, as a result, only about 10 percent of students will be directly affected. Current students will be able to finish their degrees and graduate while their programs are being phased out.

Some of the affected students will most likely transfer. Demetria Owens, who graduated from Missouri Western last year with a bachelor’s in economics, worries that the path she took will no longer exist for others.

Not only will the economics major be gone, but Owens worries that students at a scaled-down university won’t enjoy the same freedom to discover their intellectual interests and find a meaningful career path.

“I had the opportunity to explore and kind of figure out what I wanted to do without a huge amount of pressure,” Owens, 23, said. “I was able to graduate with no debt, and I got a job two weeks after I graduated. Obviously Missouri Western had a part in that.”

Started as a community college, Missouri Western attained four-year status in 1969, while continuing to serve the types of students who often go to community colleges: older, nontraditional. Students often work multiple jobs and have children at home.

“So many of the people who teach here see themselves in the students. I see myself in my students,” said Hepworth, the Faculty Senate president. “It’s affordable, but it’s an incredibly high quality of education. People who are passionate about teaching. It’s really coming from a place of service.”

Coronavirus Hits Campus

As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.

• Here’s Our List of Colleges’ Reopening Models
• Why Is Gettysburg College Giving Up on ‘The Gettysburg Review’?
• Fall-Enrollment Trends in Distance Education: a Snapshot

The last decade at Missouri Western was riddled with financial decisions that made the current cuts more painful: The past administration routinely filled positions made vacant when employees moved on or retired. Those new hires happened even though the university was running budget deficits year after year.

To close the deficits, Missouri Western tapped its financial reserves, time and again. The university also used its reserves to pay for construction projects.

At the same time, to remain competitive with its peers, the university began offering in-state tuition in 2013 to students from more than a dozen neighboring states. If out-of-state enrollment had surged as a result, that move might have made financial sense. But there was no surge.

“It ended up costing the university money,” said Wilson, who became president last July.

Bill Church, a longtime professor of English, is opting for early retirement, mindful that his departure might help one of his colleagues remain employed. Church is a Missouri Western graduate himself, and credits the college with turning his life around when he was, in his telling, a “troubled nontraditional student in my 20s.”

“I was going to go though a bankruptcy, a divorce,” Church said. “And faculty there cared so much that, in one day, in a fit of anger I had dropped a class, and a faculty member actually called me at home and negotiated with the registrar to get me back in that class. I mean, we’re that kind of a campus. People matter to us. And it doesn’t feel like that now.”

Church recalled one student, a former marketing major with no family support, who switched to English after he encouraged her to make use of her natural talent. The student wrote one of her essays about being a waitress, and going hungry as she served food to customers.

During the spring semester, she told Church, “you believe in me more than I believe in myself.”

“And I said, ‘That’s because way back, 30 years ago, people did that for me in this department,’” Church said.

Church acknowledged that President Wilson inherited a financial mess, but he said the cuts in the English department didn’t need to be so steep. And he questioned the wisdom of relying so heavily on the number of declared majors when deciding which programs live or die.

A less-severe cut could have preserved some form of an English major, Church said.

“We accept shrinkage,” he said. “We don’t accept elimination.”

Church’s star pupil, meanwhile, has decided to move on. Last week she wrote Church to tell him she would transfer this fall to Missouri Southern State University, in Joplin, where she will pursue an English degree with a literary-studies emphasis, a certificate in creative writing, and a minor in history.

“Leaving feels like a betrayal,” she wrote. “In the face of all these program and faculty cuts, though, I would never be able to find it in me to take pride in the school from which I graduated if I stayed.”

The student wrote that she had shared the news with other Missouri Western professors, who “so far have been incredibly supportive and think I’m making the right choice. I hope so too.”

Wilson, the president, said he was troubled to lose the student — and also troubled that his own employees were encouraging her to enroll elsewhere when she could stay and finish her degree.

“It’s a sad time. It’s a grieving time,” Wilson said. “No one wants to make these moves, but we’re doing it out of necessity.”

Megan Zahneis contributed to this report.