Delta State. St. Cloud State. Frostburg State. Cleveland State. Across the country, severe cuts of faculty members and academic programs at public regional universities piled up over the summer.
University administrators insist the cuts were necessary to combat budget shortfalls and adapt to evolving attitudes toward higher education. Faculty members, meanwhile, fear their institutions erased decades of progress in expanding academic disciplines and access to a comprehensive liberal-arts education, and will now force students into job-targeted programs.
Regional public universities are the workhorses of higher education, educating 70 percent of all undergraduate students at public four-year colleges. Those institutions serve large shares of low-income students and students of color, many of whom face geographical constraints in getting a higher education. On average, 38 percent of undergraduates at regional publics are Pell Grant recipients, and 46 percent are students of color.
Years of financial struggles and enrollment declines at regional publics accelerated during the pandemic. Those challenges have been exacerbated by funding cuts by state legislatures.
But there’s a cost, some faculty members and higher-ed researchers say. Without diverse academic offerings, a liberal-arts education — a common thread in the cuts — will increasingly be limited to students who attend large flagship or private institutions.
The Chronicle looked at campus cuts across the country and identified both common threads and important distinctions. Here’s what our analysis found.
No surprise: Liberal arts were the main target.
Degree offerings in areas like philosophy, foreign languages, drama, and English made up most of the casualties.
Rodger Payne helped found the University of North Carolina at Asheville’s religious-studies department, in 2009. But in June the department was axed, along with programs in philosophy, ancient Mediterranean studies, drama, French, and German. Leadership blamed the cuts on low enrollment, eliminating programs with fewer majors.
“As long as we’re focused on the profit margin of a department, then somehow we’ve lost sight of what a liberal-arts education is all about,” Payne said.
Though the news was devastating to Payne, he said it wasn’t a surprise. He’s in phased retirement, leaving only one full-time faculty member in religious studies, who will be retained. The department had only about 10 majors.
Given its small size, though, Payne said he doesn’t see how eliminating religious studies will save the university much money.
Two and a half hours away, UNC-Greensboro took a larger ax to its program offerings. The university cut 20 programs, including majors in anthropology, physics, and religious studies. Greensboro also eliminated minors in Chinese, Russian, and Korean, as well as 11 graduate programs.
The decision to cut anthropology didn’t make sense to Susan L. Andreatta, an anthropology professor. Andreatta said her department was “meeting expectations” based on a rubric developed in collaboration with the rpk Group, a higher-education consulting firm that was hired to help the college cut costs.
Asheville’s and Greensboro’s program cuts took effect this semester, though some courses in eliminated departments are still being offered.
At Delta State University, in Mississippi, the university’s president, Daniel J. Ennis, announced the closure of the College of Arts and Sciences and the elimination of 21 degree programs, including history, English, and chemistry. University leaders said they plan to replace affected programs with interdisciplinary degrees.
However, one such proposal is already on hold, said Jamie Dahman, an associate professor in the now-eliminated music department. Dahman said he’d heard from colleagues that administrators temporarily dropped a proposed degree in visual and performing arts that had been envisioned as a replacement for the shuttered arts and music programs.
“Now we’re saying, ‘OK, come to college, but you can only be a worker bee,’” Dahman said. “‘You can’t think and create and study art — that’s for privileged people.’”
The visual and performing-arts program will continue to be developed for future consideration, Ennis said in a written statement to The Chronicle.
But the cuts featured some unusual suspects.
While the austerity measures mostly came for the humanities, some struck STEM programs.
Among the most severe cuts of the summer were those at St. Cloud State University, in Minnesota, which slashed 42 degree programs and 50 minors, including sociology, gender and women’s studies, physics, and economics.
“My layoff email began with ‘Good afternoon, John, here’s your layoff papers,’” John Sinko, an associate professor of physics at St. Cloud State, said. “I wouldn’t say that’s a good afternoon.”
Sinko, who was tenured, will be employed at the university through May 2025. Physics will be folded into mathematics starting in November. According to Sinko, the layoffs disproportionately affect recently hired, lower-paid faculty members, particularly women and people of color, undermining equity gains made over the last decade.
The university has promised students they’ll be able to complete their degrees, but Sinko said he’s not sure that will be feasible with so few physics faculty members remaining to teach upper-level courses.
Faculty layoffs varied across campuses.
Some university leaders vowed to retain professors despite cutting academic programs, while others decided to eliminate faculty positions too.
UNC-Greensboro’s administration initially promised the cuts would not result in immediate layoffs. Months later, Andreatta said, several non-tenured lecturers were notified that their contracts would not be renewed for this academic year.
St. Cloud State eliminated 54 full-time faculty positions. In response to Sinko’s claims that the layoffs had disproportionately affected women and people of color, a university spokesperson shared data showing only minor changes were expected in faculty demographics due to the layoffs.
“We are committed to, as we have been in the past, hiring a diverse faculty and staff,” the spokesperson said in an email statement to The Chronicle. “This commitment will not change.”
Delta State also faced layoffs, recently informing nine faculty members — including Dahman, who was tenured — in disciplines such as music, art, foreign languages, and philosophy that their contracts would be terminated at the end of this academic year. Dahman said fewer faculty members were let go than initially expected, as some resigned right after the cuts were announced. Previously, the university eliminated 49 vacant jobs, as well as 17 staff positions and several dean and chair roles.
To close its $40-million budget gap, Cleveland State University offered buyout packages to longtime faculty and staff members in April and laid off 14 employees last month.
University leaders said the decisions were painful and necessary.
At UNC-Asheville, enrollment has dropped by 25 percent over the last five years, resulting in a $6-million budget shortfall. St. Cloud State, which is facing a $15-million deficit, has lost about 44 percent of its enrollment since 2010. Maryland’s Frostburg State University needs to cut more than $7 million from its budget to mend a structural deficit — propelled by a 36-percent drop in enrollment since 2010.
“We cannot and should not be all things to all people,” Charles L. Welch, president of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, said, repeating a common refrain of higher ed’s era of contraction.
We cannot and should not be all things to all people.
Regional publics face a one-two punch: They are historically underfunded by state legislatures compared with state flagships, and they have less access to alternative revenue sources like federal grants and contracts. These smaller colleges are further disadvantaged by funding models that dole out money based on enrollment. On average, compared with big state research universities, regional institutions receive $1,091 less in appropriations per full-time-equivalent student.
Welch said regional colleges could become more interdisciplinary and focus on preparing students for in-demand careers, through a mix of liberal-arts and job-oriented programs.
“With scarce resources, you have to ask, is continuing to offer these programs when you have three or four students interested and the jobs aren’t really there the best for the students?” Welch said. “Is it the best for the institution? Is it the best for the region?”
Faculty members remain worried about morale and enrollment.
As some professors see it, cuts will only make it harder for regional colleges to attract students. “It’s a road map to nowhere,” said Andreatta, the UNC-Greensboro professor.
Several faculty members believe university leaders haven’t been transparent or communicative, resulting in low morale on the faculty and anxiety among students about whether they should transfer.
At St. Cloud State, the president left for another institution right after announcing the sharp cuts, which Sinko found frustrating. The university’s faculty union has tried to argue that such decisions should have been left to the next president.
“This cut, like many of the other cuts the administration’s applied in the past five years, will likely drive more students away and contribute to the cycle of enrollment decline,” Sinko said.
Some students decided the uncertainty was too much.
Dylan Harjes, 22, was studying drama at St. Cloud State. While the university said it would help students in shuttered programs finish their degrees, Harjes decided to transfer to Roosevelt University, in Chicago, this fall.
Although Harjes loved the community at St. Cloud State, he said the severity of the cuts had sent the message that the administration doesn’t value the student experience.
“It doesn’t feel good to go to a school that cuts you out of their curriculum,” he said. “It just makes me feel like they used me and my family for two years.”
