‘Nobody Knows Where the Line Is’

This story was produced in partnership with The Assembly.

Before any data was pulled. Before any academic programs were graded. Before any eliminations were on the table.

Before the consulting firm rpk Group began any major work at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, administrators could see the battle to come and what they needed to win.

“Most everyone here believes we have no fat to cut. I believe otherwise,” wrote Bob Shea, the university’s vice chancellor for finance and administration, in a January 2023 email to associates from the firm. “Culture change is our biggest hurdle, and that is from the chancellor’s council all the way down to our most junior supervisors.”

He already had ideas: outsourcing custodial work, “centralizing/merging” police dispatch units, and cutting over 100 secretarial jobs. In rpk, he believed he had the partner he needed to gather the data and bring change to the institution.

“I’m looking forward to working together and rpk helping us break the cultural dynamic of organizational inertia here,” Shea concluded, adding, “We fully anticipate some sort of vote of no confidence here during your engagement with us.”

Shea was right about the blowback.

About 14 months later, the university’s general faculty assembly passed a no-confidence vote in Debbie Storrs, the provost who worked closely with rpk and Shea on an “academic-portfolio review,” a process that applies a business-minded lens to the organization of a campus, and typically leads to cuts. The vote came a few weeks after the chancellor, Franklin D. Gilliam Jr., approved Storrs’s recommendation to cut 20 programs, mostly in the College of Arts and Sciences. As many as 42 faculty members across those departments could be affected, according to an estimate from the university’s American Association of University Professors chapter.

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The declining enrollment and financial pressures that drove UNC-Greensboro to pursue cuts have hit other campuses in North Carolina. UNC-Asheville also hired a consulting firm and cut programs this spring. And more academic-portfolio reviews lie ahead for the entire UNC system after the Board of Governors passed a new policy in May that mandates the practice at the system and campus levels.

Dozens of colleges across the country have conducted academic-portfolio reviews, which essentially ask: What parts of a college make money, and which parts don’t? Consulting firms like rpk, which say they offer an outside perspective and data expertise, have built a lucrative business atop colleges’ inability — or unwillingness — to answer that question for themselves.

Following high-profile cuts that rpk advised on at West Virginia University, the firm has emerged as a particularly prominent player in the field. It has been hired by dozens of colleges, and its name has come to stir anxiety in the hearts of faculty members.

Professors critical of this process see consultants as convenient shields for administrators, who use these firms to bolster their arguments for making unpopular cuts. Others view them as hatchet men, selling a flawed process that twists data to fit preconceived suggestions on which programs — typically in the humanities and, in particular, languages — need to be chopped.

Consultants say that’s not true. “It’s kind of a silly idea that we tell senior leaders what decisions to make,” Rick Staisloff, rpk’s founder and senior partner, told The Chronicle and The Assembly. “It’s really up to the institution.”

For those who observed and participated in the process at UNC-Greensboro, it remains frustratingly unclear how the university went from seemingly straightforward data points to rubrics filled with data inaccuracies and defined by contested metrics, ultimately deciding on cuts that felt disconnected from everything in the process that came before.

“I don’t really know who made these decisions or how this went down,” said Christopher N. Poulos, head of the department of communication studies at UNC-Greensboro. “That’s the problem. If I did know, then I could critique it.”

To piece together how the process unfolded, The Chronicle and The Assembly obtained 600 pages of email correspondence and interviewed over a dozen employees and others involved.

The review shows that who truly drove Greensboro’s process remains murky. The data-driven process that consultants purport to offer, and which university officials tout for its objectivity, can be frustratingly subjective, doing little to quell divisiveness over cuts and debates about how to measure the value of academic programs.

By the time rpk staffers landed in Greensboro in January 2023, the firm was well known in higher education. Staisloff had given speeches, written articles, and worked with institutions all over the country, including Anne Arundel Community College, in Maryland, and the University of Kansas, and is often quoted in The Chronicle and featured on panels.

The firm’s work builds on ideas Staisloff developed as chief financial officer at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland (now Notre Dame of Maryland University) in the late 1990s and early 2000s. While there, he began to think about how the college was deploying its staff. At the time, chief financial officers often viewed a college’s employees as a fixed cost. How those people used their time wasn’t the subject of much thought.

But Staisloff started to wonder if there was a different way, one that factored in student demand. If administrators could quantify which courses or subjects attracted tuition-paying students, they could make sure they were spending money — and that professors were spending their time — on those things.

“People would always ask me, ‘Are we going to balance the budget?’ Nobody ever asked me, ‘Do we make money or lose money on engineering?’”

Even then, his way of analyzing colleges was met with skepticism. Higher education is generally averse to the top-down organization familiar in the corporate world. But Staisloff saw that a more fine-grained understanding was critical to colleges achieving the mission of educating students.

“It seemed like higher ed was on a path that wasn’t very sustainable,” he said. “And I wanted to see how I could be a part of that conversation, how I could contribute to normalizing the conversation.”

That conversation was coming for higher ed, whether or not it was ready for it. States were disinvesting in public colleges, leading senior administrators to start talking about how they were spending money, experts said. That gave Staisloff his opening. “People wanted help in thinking about how to have a different conversation, and I would go out and help them and it occurred to me that I could help them and maybe I could get paid,” he said.

He founded rpk in 2010, and the firm approached campuses’ problems through that business-minded lens. The firm focused on “teaching people to fish,” Staisloff said.

“I’m really not interested in just writing a report and saying good luck. We don’t sell software. We’re really in the business of holding people’s hands, learning from them, helping them solve problems that have been bugging them. For the first 10 years, that was what people were asking us to do.”

But that’s changed in recent years. Growing public skepticism of higher ed, continued state disinvestment, and the approaching demographic cliff shifted those conversations toward slimming down. In the past, Staisloff said, colleges had ample time to make strategic shifts. These days, a financial crisis can come in a flash.

Now, when consultants arrive, the stress levels rise across campus.

Critics often paint consultants as the villain. Staisloff said it’s not quite that cut-and-dried. “It’s human nature to want a simple story,” Staisloff said, “and simple stories often have good guys and bad guys.”

Faculty and staff say they often see little transparency and wonder exactly what consultants are bringing to the table, even as the number of colleges undergoing academic-program reviews continues to grow. That’s how many at UNC-Greensboro felt about rpk, largely because they had seen what had gone on at other campuses when consulting firms did these types of reviews.

UNC-Greensboro faculty members, like other critics across higher ed, have deep philosophical objections to the questions that consultants like rpk encourage administrators to ask. A college isn’t a company, they argue, and shouldn’t be run like one.

“It is that embracing of the market forces in education that leads to the bringing in of an rpk,” said Kevin Reese, a lecturer in Russian at UNC-Greensboro. “No one who was concerned fundamentally with education would be looking for that type of partnership.”

Rpk had a reputation that further unnerved some faculty. Their work at the Kansas Board of Regents, for example, supported faculty and program cuts at Emporia State University. The following year, Emporia State’s enrollment nosedived. “Absolutely disgusting hearing what they did with Kansas,” said Susan L. Andreatta, a professor of anthropology at UNC-Greensboro. “And then it was a disaster.”

It’s not just rpk that has this reputation, or UNC-Greensboro where faculty are on the edge.

At the University of Connecticut, the large consulting firm Huron has had contracts for various projects since 2014, including looking at funding, staffing, and student enrollment in a review that ended this past academic year. No layoffs or program cuts were suggested out of that review, but that didn’t stop faculty members from expressing concern about the approach.

Because consultants like Huron and rpk are now so ubiquitous across higher education, the faculty at UConn have a sense of what’s coming. And they’re bracing themselves for the worst.

“We’re waiting for the other shoe to drop,” said Chris Vials, head of UConn’s faculty union. “We haven’t seen the nightmare that we are seeing at other places.

“The narrative they seem to be painting is, ‘Faculty salaries are out of control and it seems you can do a lot to raise faculty-to-student ratios and still be ahead of your peers,’” Vials said, adding that faculty believe consultants rarely look at what he calls “administrative bloat.”

“I don’t think their presence is helpful,” he said. “It seems their recommendations are often convenient for what administrators already wanted to do.”

But Staisloff’s methods, once foreign to higher ed, are now widely accepted.

As more and more people question the value proposition of college, “I saw that was a bit of a shift of, ‘Hmm, we’ve got to do some things here differently,’” Staisloff said. The “throw more money at it” operational style that had long dominated higher ed, he said, has reached a breaking point.”

Chancellor Gilliam, of UNC-Greensboro, well understands the feeling that Staisloff described.

The political scientist arrived in North Carolina in the spring of 2015 as the university’s enrollment was growing, a trend that began in 2014. In 2019, it reached over 20,000 students. Gilliam was rolling in new revenue, and people routinely asked him with glee how much more the university would grow. Perhaps to the size of UNC-Charlotte or East Carolina University, which both had just under 30,000 students then?

Gilliam visualized a more modest peak at 23,000 based on enrollment predictions at the time. Still, expansion was the order of the day. The chancellor put about 85 percent of new revenue generated from the enrollment growth into hiring faculty and staff. Between 2014 and 2019, the university hired about 400 faculty members, including more than 90 net new positions.

“When I had $30 million in enrollment-growth money, I’m not paying attention to any of it, because we just gave them the money,” Gilliam said in an interview. “If you ask me, what my biggest mistake in all this [is], it isn’t doing APR,” he said, referring to the academic-portfolio review. “It’s giving away the $30 million thinking that we’re going to keep getting it.”

The enrollment growth stopped after 2019. Then, the pandemic hit, particularly hurting the university’s high populations of first-generation and Pell-grant-eligible students. For every percentage-point decrease in enrollment, the university loses over $3 million in state appropriations, fees, and tuition. By the fall of 2023, enrollment fell 12 percent.

As enrollment dropped over the past five years, UNC-Greensboro cut approximately 375 positions, mostly staff and administration positions. About 24 percent were faculty positions, mostly nontenure-track ones, eliminated largely through retirements and not filling vacant jobs. Federal Covid money helped replace some of the lost revenue.

But it wasn’t enough. It dawned on Gilliam in the summer of 2022, after administrators started coming to his office and telling him there was nothing left to cut, that the academic core would need to be examined further. “Like everybody else, I bought into the narrative, the growth narrative,” Gilliam said. “But unlike everybody else, I would say, without tooting my horn too much, I was among the first people to realize that this is not going to last, and that, in fact, it’s going to get really bad, really fast.”

That’s where rpk entered the picture. The firm had already been working for the system on a return-on-investment study across the state’s 16 public universities. Other firms, Gilliam said, came with “astronomical” price tags. (He wouldn’t name names.) The system office agreed to pay for half of the consultants’ work.

Gilliam wanted to know the answer to the question that had long animated Staisloff: What did students want? He didn’t know the answer, and the university’s data was a mess.

According to the contract between rpk and the university, first published by Triad City Beat, the university sought a partner to optimize its academic portfolio through a “data-informed and transparent process,” find ways to maximize administrative efficiency, and build capacity across the university to “operate more strategically and with a return-on-investment lens.”

Rpk laid out a plan to review academic offerings and the resources that supported them, conduct a high-level administrative-services review, and host workshops to “expose” deans and chairs to a return-on-investment lens. The contract stipulates that the university would not pay more than $400,000 for the firm’s work.

From the jump, faculty members were concerned about how rpk’s work and data would be leveraged down the line. “All of this data, is this simply just going to be sort of a cover where you can pick and choose what you want to rationalize, decisions you’ve already made?” said Mark Elliott, president of UNC-Greensboro’s AAUP chapter.

Early meetings with rpk representatives, Elliott said, confirmed that the consulting firm was deeply focused on the data. But they also heightened his concerns. For example, Elliott said that when faculty members raised questions about using comparative data from other institutions — a common practice in reviews of individual programs — he said rpk brushed the suggestion aside.

“They were very slick, and they were very smooth,” Elliott said. “They had answers to everything … that was deep in the weeds of the numbers. So they were hard to challenge.”

The first task rpk undertook was helping UNC-Greensboro get its data in order. The consulting firm would clean and organize the data into “academic dashboards,” a snapshot summary of key data metrics, like student enrollment and retention at both the department and program levels, and how they’ve changed over time.

Conflicts about process, metrics, and decision-making quickly arose.

For example, a couple of weeks into February, rpk drafted an answer to a proposed question for a website that would explain the program-review process to the public: “Is this project focused on the elimination of programs?” Rpk’s proposed response was “no,” explaining that any decisions about programs “will follow UNCG’s established governance procedures.” Storrs responded with edits that kept the answer as “no” but removed rpk’s line about shared governance and added that the dashboards could directly inform decisions.

For several months, the UNC-Greensboro/rpk data team — which included tenured and tenure-track faculty, adjunct faculty, and staff — met biweekly with rpk and hashed out various metrics, such as the methodology for determining a list of peer institutions and how to consider excess credits.

But a major clash over the dashboards occurred just weeks before they were set to be shared with campus, and delayed the entire launch. Shea, the finance vice chancellor, explained in an email that UNC-Greensboro “data leaders” had concerns about how the data was aggregated and worried that the consultants’ process of cleaning it would not be replicable once they left. In response, rpk began “unwinding” all of their “clean-up work,” warning that reverting to the “current state” data could result in errors in enrollment numbers. (UNC-Greensboro said that the “unwinding” did not affect any final program decisions.)

The objections were technical, but the ensuing discussion about what to do illustrated a broader point of tension between the two parties.

“Unwinding the work of a consultant we’ve hired as subject-matter experts worries me,” Shea wrote of the dispute. “Who do we listen to, to decide: our internal folks or the external experts? Rpk does this for a living.”

As the process unfolded, administrators’ preferences often prevailed over the advice of rpk.

For instance, in a comprehensive administrative-services review — which was never publicly released by the university — Storrs asked rpk not to call out three specific units the consultants identified as having too many managers and not enough direct reports. Storrs wrote that she didn’t want to cause “unnecessary angst” and disrupt personnel changes underway. Storrs also asked to broaden another recommendation, to “strategically” backfill roles from one departmental-communications unit so that it applied to all communications units across schools and academic departments. The explanation: It would be “more inclusive.”

In some cases, overruling the consultants seemed like the clear choice, Gilliam and Shea said. Perhaps the most striking example comes from one of rpk’s recommendations: that the university develop an engineering program. When asked about the recommendation, Gilliam called it “useless.”

North Carolina A&T and N.C. State Universities already have programs, and even the flagship’s enduring bid to start one faces some political opposition. “If Chapel Hill is not getting an engineering school, we definitely aren’t getting an engineering” school, Gilliam said with a chuckle.

The value of rpk to UNC-Greensboro was not necessarily in its individual recommendations, Gilliam said, but in the “more-intentional accountability” and exchange of different ideas that rpk brought to the process. The firm, he said, also offered value to the administration in “rejecting or confirming our working hypotheses.”

“The faculty challenged some of what they did, our people challenged some of what they did, and we got a result,” Gilliam said. “Perfect?” he added. “No.”

After the data was collected, the university and consultants set about determining how to best weigh the evidence and make decisions. But the job of developing a rubric to score and evaluate programs was not a straightforward task.

Emails show that administrators wanted rpk to offer them guidance, and Storrs asked rpk to bring some sample rubrics to show to the group. But the consultants didn’t have many to share, said Katie Hagan, rpk’s principal associate on the project. She explained that most institutions don’t publicly publish rubrics; they outline a general process and a list of data points, which the university had already done.

The firm had been hired to assemble the data at UNC-Greensboro, not use it to recommend cuts. Colleges sometimes avoid rubrics, Hagan wrote in an email, because they entail assigning scores or ratings to programs, which can hamper the ability to “maintain some level of flexibility in the process to allow for qualitative input and mission prioritization.”

Mike Daly, a senior associate at rpk, did send two rubric samples. The first came with hard cutoffs for metrics to sunset programs based on total head count, degree production, and program growth. The cutoffs help make decisions “more of a math problem” and remove “as much subjectivity as possible,” a blurb above the rubric explained. But qualitative measures cannot be “distilled as succinctly.”

The second rubric recommended eliminating “small or specialized programs with unfavorable student/market demand and limited growth potential,” and included a few possible metrics. While that rubric allowed for “some gray area and flexibility,” it came with a warning that reviewers must “make difficult decisions” because there are “fewer ‘rules’ to fall back on.”

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Shea and Gilliam acknowledged in an interview that there are not many roadmaps available, but they don’t believe that weighing or evaluating programs is as complicated as some make it out to be.

“If you’re not going to count student credit hours, if you’re not going to count enrollments, then what are, what are you doing?” Gilliam asked.

“It’s rather simple calculus,” Shea added.

“When people don’t like the outcomes,” Gilliam continued, “they challenge the process.”

UNC-Greensboro’s Academic Portfolio Review Task Force, made up of faculty and staff members, received predetermined, broad rubric categories, though the process behind how those categories were selected remains murky. The group was informed that the categories could not be changed, though it could modify how they were weighted, said Wade Maki, a philosophy lecturer and leader of the systemwide faculty assembly who served on the task force. “That was very constraining on our work,” he said. The group did successfully eliminate one category on the labor outcomes of graduates, which is one of rpk’s areas of focus.

Ultimately, the rubric sorted programs, scoring them as “exceeding expectations,” “meets expectations,” “approaching expectations,” or “needs examination.”

“We did the best we could, and we’re really happy with what we came out with,” Maki said. “We probably do some things differently, of course, in hindsight, but this has never been done before.”

Both the university and rpk said the rubric was developed by UNC-Greensboro, though its raw materials came from them both. Still, for some faculty members on the outside looking in, they see rpk’s methodology and philosophy as substantially determining what the rubrics were.

“When I think of rpk Group and UNCG, I think primarily of the development of that rubric,” said Stephen Tate, a computer-science professor who was interim head of the department of mathematics and statistics last year. “Now, I don’t know what else they were involved in. But I know they were involved in that.”

Gilliam described the process as a “mishmash” of the metrics brought forth from rpk’s work and the institutional data readily available. For example, the first category of the rubric, which makes up roughly 40 percent of the final score, was based largely on a cost-and-revenue analysis conducted by rpk. Other metrics, like grant allocations, came directly from the university.

“The measures aren’t perfect, but they were not handed down in stone by rpk. Our folks had a chance to review them, to manipulate them, to weigh them, to throw out the ones they thought didn’t measure us,” Gilliam said.

“Nobody knows where the line is between what we did and what rpk did,” he added. “In some measures, we went more, and in some, they went more.”

The dashboards and rubrics went public on October 6.

Panic on campus quickly followed.

The rubrics were filled with dozens of errors. Enrollment and head-count data were inaccurate, departments’ total revenue counts were off, and programs shared across departments displayed incorrectly.

The university made corrections, issuing three iterations of the rubric, with the final version coming out on October 23. For some faculty members, that undermined the rubric from the start.

“The bottom line, first, is the faculty don’t have any confidence in the data,” said Tate, the former interim head of the math and statistics department. “The first scoring spreadsheets that were released were just, like, chock full of errors — and some, like, silly, obvious, glaring errors.”

For many students, the rubrics’ release was the first time they’d heard about the academic-portfolio review and rpk. That included Holly Buroughs, a fifth-year physics student who was stunned by the number of errors in the rubric and dismayed by the physics and astronomy departments’ low scores. Late one night in their dorm room, Boroughs went searching for answers about the review process that resulted in them doom scrolling to learn more about rpk.

“I was just like, ‘Oh no. This isn’t good,” Buroughs said. “They just seem to not have a great track record in terms of universities that they’ve worked with.”

Gilliam said the errors were caused by a combination of bugs in the data, miscoding, and the release times of some fall data. He considered the errors “unavoidable,” given the complicated nature of institutional data, though he noted that they “did not materially change any of the results” of the rubric.

Still, the rubrics ignited protest from faculty and students who feared cuts were coming. While the protesters targeted the university and administrators, with signs like “Cut Their Salaries, Not Our Programs,” other critiques focused on rpk, including slogans such as “rpk group: Your data is a joke. We’re not laughing.”

Beyond the data errors, faculty members began to pick apart the metrics. No program “exceeded expectations.” About 62 percent of programs scored “meeting expectations,” 37.2 percent scored “approaching expectations,” and just one program, the master’s program in health management, scored “needs examination.”

The date range that was analyzed — which emails show rpk pushed for even when administrators raised questions about it — became one of the most hotly contested choices. A report from a College of Arts and Sciences committee argued that the rubric disadvantaged small programs, placed too much weight on the four-year graduation rate, and relied solely on years during which student cohorts went through Covid and its disruptions.

Further fueling faculty outrage about the rubrics and the threat of cuts was the campus’s AAUP chapter’s release of a report on the university’s finances that concluded the university was on “solid financial footing.” The AAUP chapter commissioned the report from Howard Bunsis, a professor of accounting at Eastern Michigan University who’s come to similar conclusions after analyzing other universities’ finances and often provokes resistance from administrators, including Gilliam.

Even as faculty members questioned the merit of the rubrics and the reasons behind the process, some saw a silver lining: Good scores, they reasoned, meant their departments were safe.

“We were scored high enough that we felt like we didn’t need to worry about further impact, at least for the present,” said Reese, the Russian lecturer, pointing to the language department’s score of “meeting expectations.” That surprised him, since he had braced for the worst based on rpk’s involvement at West Virginia University, where the university cut the entire foreign languages department.

Andreatta, the anthropology professor, felt the same. “We met expectations. We were solid in many areas,” she said. “So, I thought, ‘OK. We’re there.’”

The feeling of safety didn’t last very long.

On January 14, Andreatta was in an anthropology-of-food class when some of her 18 students broke the news: They’d received an email saying the anthropology major would be among the programs recommended for discontinuation.

While Andreatta and her colleagues went into “panic mode,” she tried to comfort her students. But she didn’t have much information or explanation to offer them as she grappled for answers herself. “It was pretty much shock. What does this mean? What does it mean for [the students]?” she said. “At that time, we didn’t know — does discontinued mean we’re done in May?”

The other recommended cuts included majors in physical education, physics, religious studies, and secondary education in geography; minors in Chinese and Russian; all course offerings in Korean; and various graduate programs in drama, geography, interior architecture, math, nursing, and special education. Graduate programs in communication sciences and disorders, and in teaching languages, literatures, and cultures were also cut. Making matters worse: Enrollment numbers released for the cut programs were initially wrong. (Gilliam later took responsibility for the errors in his initial announcement, calling it a “human error.”)

Elliott, the president of the university’s AAUP chapter, said the disconnect between the rubrics and the cuts baffled many on campus. He said that throughout the process, from the early listening sessions through the portfolio-review task force, administrators portrayed the rubric as a product of faculty input and a major part of the review.

“We spent a lot of time arguing about what’s in the rubric … whether it worked or didn’t work,” Elliott said. “So then, when they come to make the decisions, they started to back off the rubric as being the whole key to their analysis.”

In messages about the rubric throughout the fall, university administrators did emphasize that it would be just one piece of their review. “Relatively low rubric scores should not, all by themselves, be construed as reason for concern about programs. Rubric scores are the beginning of the evaluative process, not the end,” Storrs wrote in one message.

Still, faculty members struggled to discern why certain programs that scored “meeting expectations” got slashed in the end. Minors — several of which were cut — weren’t even graded on the rubric. In particular, the cutting of Korean courses struck a nerve; advocates for Korean said the program had just one adjunct professor, high student demand, and it fed a popular study-abroad program.

“When you start to touch the threads,” said Reese, “the whole thing unravels.”

For Gilliam, the decisions of what to cut in many cases boiled down to just a few key indicators.

“If you aren’t teaching much — so there’s not a lot of student credit hours being generated — and there’s not a lot of students in your classes because there’s no demand, and you’re a tenure-track professor that we’re paying, that calculus just seems to me pretty obvious,” Gilliam said.

Exceptions arise when a program is mission-critical to the university, Gilliam said, pointing to programs like gender and women’s studies and African American studies that scored low on the rubric but the university kept.

When Gilliam talked to faculty and staff in the programs recommended for cuts, he said those conversations didn’t sway him. “I was struck then by the arguments that people made, which was essentially, ‘Don’t you know how important this discipline is to the world? Why on earth would you cut it?’ Which wasn’t a very compelling answer,” Gilliam said.

But the objections to the process — and Gilliam’s annoyance with those attacks — endured. For example, at a heated campus forum in late January, a student asked a question about the “abysmal quality of the data.” In the room, Gilliam fought back.

“I’ve published a lot of peer-reviewed articles. In fact, the president of Harvard was accused of plagiarizing my papers,” he said. “So I think I maybe know a little bit about data. When you do that, let me know.”

Gilliam told The Assembly and The Chronicle that those forums were the “biggest challenge” of the process. “It was hard for me to sit there and have students essentially ridicule you, faculty act juvenile,” Gilliam said.

“I lost my cool a couple of times, and I shouldn’t have,” he added. “But to get chastised by a person who doesn’t have a lot of experience is difficult.”

Sixteen days after the provost’s proposals were announced, Gilliam officially approved the cuts. Every program in the initial proposal was on his list. (Religious-studies faculty, Gilliam said, convinced them that it should be preserved as a concentration under a different program, though they must meet certain enrollment benchmarks.) While some courses offered by the cut programs will continue, the departments will close in a few years in accordance with teach-out plans. The number of layoffs remains unknown at this point.

Professors condemned the decisions. The Faculty Senate censured Gilliam and Storrs one day before the cuts became final, and the general faculty assembly passed a vote of no confidence in Storrs. The provost resigned from her post in the spring, citing her diagnosis of stage 4 breast cancer. She pushed back on the no-confidence vote and critiques of the process in an opinion essay.

“This attack from a minority of faculty members was part of increasingly personal, desperate maneuvers that distracted focus and energy from an unambiguous truth: Our status quo is no longer tenable,” Storrs wrote in the essay.

“Reasonable people will debate the best paths forward, but there’s no reason in resisting all progress,” she continued. “If obstruction, backbiting, and petty mudslinging prevail, the university will fall victim to a slow whittling-away of interest, resources, and confidence.”

UNC-Greensboro’s academic-portfolio review reflects bitter back-and-forths about conflicting interpretations of data, fierce debates about how to evaluate programs, and lingering questions about the cuts’ rationales. It all underscores what Staisloff says is a core truth of the academic-portfolio-review process: How the sausage is made is more complicated than anyone wants to admit.

“None of this is a math problem,” Staisloff said. “Here’s myth one: that you cranked the numbers, and somehow, it told you what to do. It doesn’t tell you what to do.”

The ambiguity and subjectivity of the decision-making has exacted a price that is deeply felt on campus. Faculty place blame on administrators for hiring rpk to spearhead the process — but they feel left in the dark about how exactly the institution arrived at its decisions and where it’s going.

“We, as the instructors, I guess, are just in a perpetual state of confusion,” Reese said. “If it wasn’t rpk’s number, then whose [was it]? If it wasn’t rpk’s recommendations, then why was rpk hired?”

That’s how some students felt, too. “Rpk has been the cover that the administration has been able to work under,” said Azariah Journey, a graduate student who helped organize student protests. “Admin has said this is their decision. Rpk just quote-unquote helps them make it. So we don’t trust them. We’ve lost faith in our administration, unfortunately, and we lost faith in rpk.”

Meanwhile, Gilliam said he is seeking to move forward, and knows he has some trust to rebuild. The university’s strategic-planning committee will soon release its plan that he believes will guide them into the future — a future in which, Gilliam said, the university must reshape its identity to face mounting challenges. That is, in essence, what he sees as the main point of the cuts.

“If we don’t change and try to control it ourselves, it will be done to us one way or another, and we won’t like it,” he said. “We’ll like it even less.”

Similar conversations have happened at other campuses in North Carolina. UNC-Asheville, which also employed a consulting firm and conducted an academic-portfolio review, announced in June it would eliminate four out of 27 academic departments. And more are coming.

The UNC system Board of Governors adopted a policy in the spring that will require all public universities to review their academic programs every seven years, and a systemwide academic-portfolio review will be conducted every two years.

In the July meeting where the Board of Governors officially approved the cuts at Greensboro and Asheville, some questions arose about the impact on students and the preservation of the liberal arts. But over all, board members and system representatives commended the campuses for paving the path for the future.

“We know your campuses will not be the only campuses we have this conversation with,” said Sonja Phillips Nichols, a board member. “Moving forward, we’re gonna have to do this on every single campus. I’m hoping everybody else is getting ready for this very hard, but very necessary, road that we need to travel.”

Read the entire collection of emails here.