1,096 miles is about what it takes to get from Paris to Berlin, from Mexico City to Corpus Christi, or to do about three laps around Los Angeles. In short: it’s a long distance.
That’s why I was so surprised to see the University of North Carolina Greensboro (UNCG), which is a 1,096 mile drive away, getting their programs cut with consulting from rpk GROUP – the same consulting organization that worked with Emporia State on its “restructuring”.
When I saw confirmation of UNCG’s program cuts on Feb. 1show up on my Twitter timeline, I was surprised by all the similarities between what’s happening at UNCG and ESU: a rushed timeline to cut programs with unclear goals and poor data explanations, which feel ideologically motivated, that exclude the input of faculty.
I decided to reach out to UNCG faculty and see how their cuts were going over there. I was shocked to learn that the similarities are deeper than I had originally thought.
I wanted to write this article because I think the restructuring here at ESU was simultaneously decontextualized from larger attacks on higher education, and then recontextualized as a reinvestment that we must make, and that, eventually, every university will have to make. But I think decisions are rarely motivated by an objective analysis of the direction history is moving; instead, they’re often ideologically motivated and use data to explain those decisions after the fact. They often start with their conclusion and work their way backwards.
To say the quiet part out loud, I’m very critical of our administration’s restructuring and their handling of it. I think there’s a difference between understanding that a university needs to be financially sound and running a university like a business. I don’t think ESU’s current vision or its architects understand or care to differentiate between the two.
I’ve spoken with and listened to enough of the administration discuss data and goals that I find their explanation wanting, and I’ve spoken with and listened to enough faculty with forward thinking ideas that were excluded from the restructuring process, that I feel comfortable saying this whole thing has been handled poorly. I think a lot of people haven’t wanted to say their quiet thoughts out loud because it threatens their career stability.
ESU has trudged along amid poor enrollment and poor student involvement, and I think a lot of people are asked to pretend like the restructuring was a small part in an inevitable chain of broader trends that prevented us from doing anything but cutting programs. I think a lot of people had their voices sidelined in the conversation, in particular the faculty. So, I thought I’d ask the UNCG faculty what they thought of what’s going on with their university.
This will be the first of a few articles on the two hours of interviews I conducted with UNCG faculty. There’s a lot to cover here, and I want to start with their words on the process at their university before the cuts began and the faculty input.
When the University of North Carolina state university system began its return-on-investment study and notified faculty, it “raised the hackles” of Dr. Faye Stewart, Director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Graduate Program and Associate Professor of German Studies at UNCG. Stewart works closely with other programs in Languages, Literature and Culture, including the now cut Chinese and Russian minors and all the university’s Korean language courses.
“As a humanities person, I’m very skeptical of any attempt to monetize the skills and the degrees that students get from studying our disciplines,” Stewart said.
Concerning the appointment of President Hush and the changes that would soon be coming to Emporia State, chairwoman of the Kansas Board of Regents Cheryl Harrison-Lee said, “We believe this is an opportunity to be able to take some of the best practices from the business world and bring them over to the higher education world. I think it’s going to help the humanities look at ways to be able to transfer into the workforce.”
As a history and political science major, I cannot exaggerate how much I hate the insistence that, somehow, the financialization of the humanities will make me more marketable. It is a hollowing out of the humanities to insist that the only purpose of learning is to get a job. I have questions about people, our history, and our politics that I need answers to. That’s why I have my major: to equip me with the ability to answer those questions.
But if you disagree with me and think the focus of getting a degree is just to get a job: why do these processes to make degrees more marketable always seem to exclude the faculty which teach them?
“We were told through our campus email to everybody that, this was on January 16th, the chancellor sent out an email saying these are the programs that the Deans have chosen for elimination and we have 16 days to discuss and follow up,” said Dr. Alicia Aarnio, astrophysicist and assistant professor of physics and astronomy at UNCG.
After hearing this, I really started to understand the similarities between UNCG and ESU. At ESU, intent to eliminate faculty was announced on Sept. 7 and feedback was due by the morning of Sept. 12.
When ESU says its decisions were made with faculty input and when Chancellor of UNCG Dr. Franklin Gilliam Jr. says there will be opportunities for input, are they referring to the one to two week period given to faculty to provide input while they must still continue to do their job?
“The faculty, by and large, feels that their input was not very substantial, and that many of the decisions were made in advance and the process was just there to justify what they already wanted to do,” said Dr. Mark Elliott, associate professor of history and associate head of UNCG’s history department. Elliott is also president of UNCG’s American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Chapter.
The AAUP wrote extensively on the restructuring at ESU, censuring the university’s decision for its “absence of meaningful faculty involvement.”
Speaking with the Kansas Reflector in Sept. 2022, Dr. Michael Smith, professor of political science at ESU, said, “I think there are a lot of us that would like to see more faculty input.”
I think some people are going to read all of this and accuse me of opening old wounds. However, I feel compelled to write this now because I don’t think enough was said in the short time given. I don’t think the administration at ESU has adequately explained to students, faculty, alumni, and stakeholders why such drastic decisions were made in such a short time. I don’t think enough feedback was given, and I don’t think students at ESU grasp the weight of what it means to be an alumni from a university so flagrantly disregarding academic norms.
I fear the same thing is going to happen at UNCG.
These aren’t even the only examples. An rpk-GROUP-consulted series of cuts at West Virginia University ended in terminating 143 of its faculty. The consistency and breadth of program cuts is trending towards a devaluation of the people who teach higher education, of the uniquely human activity of asking difficult questions and finding difficult answers.
I fear that ESU is a drop in the bucket of what’s to come, and if people can’t identify what happened to us as part of a pattern that puts us in company with WVU and UNCG, then they will lack the language and context to express how they think a society should approach higher education.
I fear that ESU students still don’t understand how bad the restructuring was here.
“It was literally one of our rallying cries of the protestors, ‘Don’t turn us into Emporia State,’ because we saw what happened there,” Elliot said.
I was blessed growing up to be able to interact with people from whom I learned the value of higher education. The year I graduated high school, the now retired professor of communications at Kansas Wesleyan, Dr. Gary Harmon, told me that “learning is good because it’s good to learn.” In that same conversation, he told me that higher education is like the tree of knowledge- “you should never prune it, you should only water it.”
I think those words are going to stick with me until I’m dead.
My fear is that there are a lot of trees of knowledge in the 1,096 miles between Emporia and Greensboro. I’m afraid that our country has committed to pruning them, not watering them.
