Charles C. Bolton didn’t know he needed to save the anthropology major at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro until it was too late.
Last month, anthropology appeared on a list of 20 academic programs recommended for discontinuation. The cuts targeted five undergraduate majors, two language minors, 12 graduate programs, and all of the university’s Korean language courses.
Faculty had been anxiously awaiting the list since UNC Greensboro’s administration announced in late 2022 that it would review the performance of all the university’s programs, due to financial issues and enrollment declines.
But Bolton — who’d been associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences since 2017, and also began serving as the interim head of the anthropology department in August of last year — said he didn’t think he’d have to worry about anthropology. Its external funding was robust. Its enrollment was rebounding, slowly but surely, from a drop in students that occurred during the pandemic.
Most importantly, Bolton said, anthropology had scored well according to the success metrics created for the review process, receiving the designation of “meets expectations.” (No program at the university received the highest designation on the rubric, “exceeds expectations,” according to a copy of the program-review data obtained by The Chronicle.)
The announcement of the finalized program cuts this month frustrated hundreds of faculty who felt the academic-portfolio review, or APR, was not transparent or fair. Bolton resigned from his administrative positions in protest.
Many colleges across the country are in the midst of examining their academic offerings and considering program eliminations and layoffs to try to save money. The circumstances often pit administrators who argue cuts are needed to chart a sustainable future against faculty who say such review processes cut at the core identity and mission of the university.
People now are just really angry and really distrustful of the administration.
At UNC-Greensboro, many on campus blamed Chancellor Franklin D. Gilliam Jr., along with Provost Debbie Storrs and the consultancy brought in to set metrics for the review, rpk Group — the same firm that recommended cuts at West Virginia University last year. UNC-Greensboro’s Faculty Senate voted to censure both administrators, a step that some critics said was rushed.
“People now are just really angry and really distrustful of the administration,” Bolton said. “We needed more of an idea where we were going, to start off with. We needed more real input about what the process would be. And then we just needed the process, as we decided upon, to operate fairly, which it did not.”
In an interview, Gilliam said that reviewing programs is a “periodic necessity” as student demand and the labor market change. Moreover, the university saw financial trouble ahead: State funding was tied to enrollment, and enrollment was dropping. Every drop of just 1 percentage point in enrollment brings a $2-million decrease in state appropriations, Gilliam said. UNC-Greensboro’s enrollment has declined by more than 12 percent since 2019.
“It’s unfortunate. We didn’t anticipate being in this position,” Gilliam said. “But we have to do the responsible thing. We are trying to be proactive, as opposed to reactive, to avoid having to have significant layoffs in any sort of immediate way.”
Questioning the Cost Savings
While cuts are happening across higher ed, public regional institutions like UNC-Greensboro are feeling the effects more than most flagships and other colleges with more resources.
A growing number of public regionals are struggling amid the so-called demographic cliff, a steep, nationwide drop in the number of high-school graduates. Kimberly van Noort, chancellor of another regional university in the state, UNC-Asheville, announced Tuesday it would “curtail” the use of adjunct faculty and put a freeze on hiring, travel, and expenditures to deal with a $6-million deficit.
“The name-brand schools are going to feel this last, but they will feel it too,” Gilliam said. “We’re the canaries in the coal mine.”
The campus outrage at UNC-Greensboro may inform how other public colleges in North Carolina handle academic-program reviews in the near future, according to Wade Maki, chair of the UNC system’s Faculty Assembly and a philosophy professor at UNC-Greensboro.
“We were the first ones to go through it, but what’s happened to UNCG is going to be happening to several other institutions,” Maki said. He declined to specify which colleges were poised to make cuts, but said he believes administrators elsewhere are trying to keep things quiet “based on how our faculty reacted.”
Maki said he believes other colleges will limit the involvement of people across campus in the process — keeping information to “upper administration and a few selected faculty” — until final decisions about cuts are announced. The announcement of recommended cuts at UNC-Greensboro weeks before the final list came out caused anxiety among faculty.
It’s an opportunity for us to sharpen our focus and say, What is it that we do best? What makes us unique in the marketplace?
Faculty who spoke with The Chronicle said a central grievance with the review process was inadequate communication of both a long-term vision for the university and justification for the cuts from senior administrators.
“Our administration has claimed that this is all necessary for financial planning for the future and for a more efficient university, though they’ve never demonstrated this successfully,” said Mark Elliott, president of UNC-Greensboro’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors. “They’ve shown us no projections that these cuts are going to save money.”
Stephen R. Tate, interim head of the department of mathematics and statistics, believes “a lot of the cuts they’re making simply have no budgetary impact,” a sentiment shared by several faculty interviewed by The Chronicle. In Tate’s department, both the master’s in mathematics and the Ph.D. in computational mathematics, whose students provide 150 hours per week of tutoring assistance to undergraduates, were eliminated.
“I don’t know how you keep supporting student success without the graduate students,” Tate said.
According to Gilliam, the end goal of the process is to begin establishing the university’s niche. The era in which “higher education could be everything, everywhere, all at once” is no more, he said.
“It’s an opportunity for us to sharpen our focus and say, What is it that we do best? What makes us unique in the marketplace?”
Gilliam maintains the entire process was “highly transparent,” pointing to the dozens of forums and discussions between faculty and senior administrators. “I wanted it to be about more than simply numbers,” he said. “I know it’s about people.” As a result of discussions, the religious studies major was saved from elimination and instead transformed into a concentration, Gilliam said.
But Bolton felt the opportunity to offer input, as well as the review over all, was a superficial process to justify cutting programs that were otherwise performing well. He also said he thought that deans ultimately shouldered much of the burden of making the cuts and were forced to take the blame when outrage ensued.
“This was always the kind of thing that’s going to create pain and turmoil,” Bolton said. “But I think if there was a feeling that it was more transparent, and that the administration was being honest and fair, that while people might be upset, they wouldn’t be as angry.”
