Eighteen low-enrollment undergraduate majors at Miami University in Ohio, many of which are in the humanities, have been directed to reinvent themselves, potentially by merging with other programs.
It’s not professors’ fault that the university can no longer afford to support its current lineup of academic programs, the office of the provost wrote in a document that was shared with affected department chairs earlier this semester. Rather, the “unprecedented fiscal, societal, and political challenges” that Miami faces are part of a “larger troubling higher education landscape.”
Faculty members in flagged undergraduate programs need to make plans to change. The document outlines four broad options: develop or focus on a minor or certificate program; propose “creative and exciting” new courses or learning opportunities; merge stand-alone majors into one major with multiple concentrations, or work with other departments to create a “super” major.
The university provided The Chronicle with a list of affected programs. Among them are American studies, French and German language programs, classical studies, critical race and ethnic studies, Spanish education, and health communication.
While one state over, West Virginia University has undertaken program cuts criticized by its faculty for being top-down and drastic, Miami administrators are eyeing a much more moderate reform. But their plan signals that, for many colleges, predictions of needed belt tightening ahead are starting to become reality.
Like many universities, Miami is maneuvering through a thicket of difficult statistics. At a recent Faculty Assembly meeting, university leaders discussed Americans’ waning interest in going to college, Ohio’s drop in college applications, and flagging state appropriations to the university, among other problems, The Miami Student reported.
And 72 percent of Miami students are enrolled in just 30 majors, the provost, Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix, told The Chronicle in an interview Tuesday. Student demand is trending toward disciplines that are perceived to lead to better jobs, she said, such as business and engineering.
“It’s absolutely devastating to think about ending programs that faculty have spent years, in some cases their entire careers, creating and refining, and which are excellent,” Mullenix said. But “because we’re on the other side of this paradigm shift, we really have to rethink the way that some of our disciplines function in the academy.” Especially given the university’s dependence on tuition revenue, it’s “imperative that our investments align with student interest in the future, while still remaining true to our mission.”
So earlier this semester, Mullenix met with chairs of departments that house programs with fewer than 35 students to discuss how they could “reimagine the curriculum,” she said. This was not something the Board of Trustees mandated, according to Mullenix, though she added that the board, in paying attention to the challenging trends affecting the university as well as the disciplines in high student demand that need resources to grow, has “expressed a desire to have me, as provost, take a look at these things.”
The document that was shared with department chairs outlining various options was informed by a steering committee Mullenix put together this summer on the future of the humanities. “Unlike other institutions where programs are simply eliminated by central administration or the Board of Trustees,” the document says, “we must advance a new vision for academic affairs that continues to promote liberal arts outcomes as central to its mission yet does so in a much more collaborative way.”
Going forward, it says, departments “must lean on one another to promote high quality and innovative learning experiences for our students.”
The directive sent programs scrambling, said Elena Jackson Albarrán, an associate professor of history and global and intercultural studies. She sees these targeted majors, including the program she teaches in — Latin American, Latino/a and Caribbean studies — as being at the center of the university’s liberal-arts mission. Getting rid of them would be a “big identity shift” for Miami, said Albarrán, and she questions how exactly these changes would save the university money. Her program, she said, is “teeny tiny.”
“What’s concerning,” Albarrán added, “is that never in any of this process has the language from administration been, ‘We see that these units are struggling and you have value in our liberal-arts curriculum and you belong here, and we want to help you become robust or strategize to be more visible to students.’” Instead, professors have received the message that they must “direct the change, or the change will be made to you,” she said.
“If you are the agents of your own change, then change won’t happen to you,” as was the case at West Virginia University, Mullenix told The Chronicle. As provost, “I am doing everything in my power to make sure that we can innovate, so that we can figure out how to create a new kind of liberal arts,” which, Mullenix allowed, “definitely will look different … And it might not have a whole bunch of humanities departments. But, I don’t know. I’m not the [subject matter] expert.” She and her faculty colleagues “have to work together to try to figure that out.”
As for the university budget, if Miami is, say, paying a lot of temporary faculty members to teach in a low-enrolled program, she said, “those are resources that we can’t give to a department who has literally a thousand majors and [is] growing and growing, whose faculty has been fixed at a certain number.”
Mila Ganeva, who heads the department of German, Russian, Asian, and Middle Eastern languages and cultures, said that her unit was invited to think about “innovative ways to move forward” without losing any permanent faculty members. Professors are working on a plan, but its details are not final. Students who are currently enrolled in flagged majors “are not threatened in any way,” she said.
J. Scott Brown, who chairs the sociology and gerontology department, which houses the low-enrolled social justice major, said he likes Miami University’s approach much more than West Virginia University’s. From Brown’s perspective, Miami remains committed to its mission of producing well-rounded students, and is attempting to preserve disciplines it still sees as valuable but that lack robust demand.
Students, and their parents, are more “vocationally focused” than they have been in the past, Brown said. Would he love it if the social justice major continued as is and suddenly enrolled hundreds of students? Of course, he said.
But that, he said, is simply “not the higher-education marketplace right now.”
